Stravinsky Memorias

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MEMORIES ANDCOMMENTARIES

Also by Mr. Stravinsky and Mr. Craft

CONVERSATIONS WITH IGOR STRAVINSKY

expositions and developments ( in preparation

)

Memories and

Commentaries

IGOR STRAVINSKY

and ROBERT CRAFT

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MUSIC LIBRARY

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Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 60-10684

Copyright © 1959, 2960 by Igor Stravinsky

All Rights Reserved

Printed in the United States of America

First Edition

Socrates, to the Eleatic Stranger: "... I shall only

beg of you to say whether you like and are accus-

tomed to make a long oration on a subject which

you want to explain to another, or to proceed by

the method of question and answer. I remember

hearing a very noble discussion in which Par-

menides employed the latter of the two methods,

when I was a young man, and he was far ad-

vanced in years."

—Sophist, 217

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The authors and the publisher are indebted to and

wish to acknowledge the following for permission to

reprint the materials mentioned: Wystan Auden for

his letters; Alexander Benois for his letters; "Executor

of the late Lord Berners" for letters from Lord

Berners; the Bollingen Foundation for a letter from

Paul Valery; Librairie Gallimard for the letters of

Andre Gide ("all rights reserved"); Romola Nijinsky

for a letter from Nijinsky; Marie Romain Rolland for

the letter from Igor Stravinsky to Romain Rolland,

which appeared originally in The Journal of RomainRolland; Ren6 Schrameck, Executeur Testamentaire

of the estate of Reynaldo Hahn, for the letter from

Reynaldo Hahn; Winfried Zillig and the British

Broadcasting Corporation for a letter from Winfried

Zillig. The musical example from Gruppen, by Stock-

hausen, on page 121, is used by permission of Uni-

versal Edition, Vienna, the copyright owners.

TONADIA BOULANGER

CONTENTS

Autobiographical 15

I. A Russian Education

II. Diaghilev and His Dancers

III. Some Russian Composers ( Rimsky-Korsakov, Cui,

Arensky, Taneyev, Liadov, Scriabin, Prokofiev)

Portraits M6moires 69

(Valery, Rolland, Falla, Hahn, Gorodetsky and Balmont,

Berners, Royaut6)

Some Musical Questions 85

Three Operas 123

I. The Nightingale (Letters form Alexander Benois)

II. Persephone ( Letters from Andre Gide

)

III. The Rake's Progress ( Letters from W. H. Auden

)

Appendix 155

First Scenario for The Rake's Progress

MEMORIES ANDCOMMENTARIES

Autoliogra^hical

I. A RUSSIAN EDUCATION

FAMILY

R.C. Do you know the origin of your name?

LS. "Stravinsky" comes from "Strava," the name of a small

river, tributary to the Vistula, in eastern Poland. We were

originally called Soulima-Stravinsky—Soulima being the

name of another Vistula branch—but when Russia annexed

this part of Poland, the Soulima was for some reason

dropped. The Soulima-Stravinskys were landowners in

eastern Poland, as far back as they can be traced. In the

reign of Catherine the Great they moved from Poland to

Russia.

R.C. Would you draw your family tree?

LS. See chart on page 16.

R.C. What do you know about your grandparents and

great-grandparents?

LS. The only great-grandparent about whom I had heard

anything at all was Roman Furman, and about him I know

only that he was a high "Excellency," that he came from

the Baltic provinces, and that he was also an ancestor of

Diaghilev's—which made Diaghilev my distant cousin. Of

my grandfathers, too, I know very little. Ignace Stravinsky

was more famous for his escapades with women than for

anything else, and stories of his Don Juan-like behavior

reached me in my childhood. His amorous propensities

continued until his very old age and were an embarrass-

i6 MEMORIES AND COMMENTARIES

— \C till

if §8.a.

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL \J

ment to my very staid father. He was a Pole, and therefore

a Catholic, but Alexandra Skorohodova was Orthodox; ac-

cording to Russian law, the children of a mixed marriage

had to be Orthodox, so my father was baptized in the

Russian Church. Rimsky used to tease me, saying, "So your

grandfather's name was Ignace? I smell a Catholic there."

Kiril Kholodovsky was born in Kiev—a 'little Russian," as

the Kievlani are called. He was a minister of agriculture

and served on the Tsar's famous "Council of Thirty." Hedied of tuberculosis, a disease that has attacked our family

ever since: my first wife, Catherine Nossenko, her mother

(who was my aunt), and our elder daughter died of it;

my younger daughter and granddaughter have spent years

in sanatoriums with it, and I myself have suffered from it

at various times, but most severely in 1939, when I was

five months in the sanatorium at Sancellemoz.

R.C. And about your parents?

I.S. I only know that they met in my mother's city of Kiev,

where my father was the first basso of the opera, and that

they were married there. My father had been a law

student in the Niejinsky Lyceum when he discovered his

good bass voice and good musical ear. He went from the

lyceum to the St. Petersburg Conservatory and became

a pupil of Professor Everardi, whose school for the voice

was as celebrated as Auer's school for the violin. At

graduation he accepted a position in the Kiev Opera,

which he held for a few years, until he was ready for the

Opera in St. Petersburg.

R.C. Did anyone in your family besides your father pos-

sess musical ability?

I.S. I think not. At least, I never heard my father or

mother claim any musical talent for their parents or grand-

parents, and I know that my father considered his own

l8 MEMORIES AND COMMENTARIES

musical ear and memory as a kind of supra-Mendelian

phenomenon. I should add, however, that my mother was

a competent pianist and a good sight reader, and that she

was at least mildly interested in music all her life.

R.C. How did it happen that you were born in Oranien-

baum—that is, why did your family move there from St.

Petersburg?

I.S. Oranienbaum was a pleasant seaside village built

around an eighteenth-century palace. It faced Kronstadt,

and my parents had gone there a month before I was born

to enjoy the early summer air. We never returned to

Oranienbaum after my birth, however, and I have never

seen it since—if I saw it then. My friend Charles-Albert

Cingria, a critic of "the Stravinsky of the international

style," used to call me "le maitre d'Oranienbaum."

R.C. Can you describe your father's character?

I.S. Oh, oh, he was not very "commode." In fact, I was

constantly frightened of him, which, I suppose, has deeply

harmed my own character. He had an uncontrollable

temper, and life with him was very difficult. He would

lose himself in his anger, suddenly and unexpectedly, and

without regard to where he might happen to be. I remem-

ber being terribly humiliated in a street in Bad Homburg

when he suddenly ordered me to return to our hotel room

—I was in my eleventh or twelfth year—and when I sulked,

instead of immediately obeying him, he caused a major

scandal in the street. He was affectionate to me only when

I was ill—which seems to me an excellent excuse for any

hypochondriac tendencies I might have. Whether or not

to gain his affection, I caught pleurisy when I was thirteen

and was left with tuberculosis for a time afterward. Dur-

ing this period of illness he was a different man to me and

I forgave him everything that had happened before. He

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ig

was a distant parent, however—distant not only to his chil-

dren but also, or so he seemed to me, to his surroundings.

He impressed me in his death more than he had ever done

in his life. He had once fallen on the stage of the opera

and, some time later, he suddenly complained of great

pain in his back in the place that had been struck by the

fall. He went to Berlin for Rontgen treatment, but the can-

cer, which is what it was, had developed beyond hope of

cure. He died a year and a half later on the couch in his

study, saying, "I feel so good, so very good." His death

brought us close together.

R.C. And the character of your mother and brothers?

I.S. I was close to no one in my family except my brother

Goury. For my mother I felt only "duties." My feelings

were all fixed upon Bertha, my nurse. Bertha was an East

Prussian who knew almost no Russian; German was the

language of my nursery. Perhaps I should blame Bertha

for corrupting me (somewhat as Byron must have been

corrupted in Aberdeen by May Gray), but I do not. She

lived on to nurse my own children, and was forty years in

our family when she died, in Morges, in 1917. I mourned

her more than I did, later, my mother. When I remember

my older brothers at all, it is to remind myself how ex-

ceedingly they used to annoy me. Roman was a law stu-

dent. At eleven he caught diphtheria, which weakened

his heart and killed him ten years later. I thought him a

very handsome brother and I was proud of him, but I

could not confide in him, for he was absolutely untouched

by music.

Youry—George—was an architectural engineer, and he

continued to work as one in Leningrad until his death

there in 1941. He was not close to me as a child, or later,

for he never wrote to me when I left Russia, and I last

saw him in 1908. His wife did write to me once in Paris,

20 MEMORIES AND COMMENTARIES

however, and in 1925 their elder daughter Tatiana visited

me there. Youry died shortly before the German invasion,

as I learned from a Mr. Borodin, a friend of Rimsky's eldest

son Michael, who used to send me letters from somewhere

on Long Island with news of friends of mine in Russia: I

heard of Andrei Rimsky-Korsakov's death from him (but

I also had this news from Rachmaninov ) , of Maximilian

Steinberg's, and finally of Youry's.

Goury began his career, like Roman and myself, as a law

student. He had inherited my father's voice and musical

ear, however, and he was determined to be a singer.

Rather than enter the conservatory, he studied with

Tartakov, a famous St. Petersburg singer, and sang pro-

fessionally in a private St. Petersburg theater from

1912-14. To my great regret, I did not hear him there,

but Diaghilev did, and reported to me that Goury was

very good. Goury had a baritone voice, like my father's in

quality, but not as deep in range. I composed my Verlaine

songs for him, and I was always grieved that he did not

live to sing them professionally. He was conscripted early

in the 1914 war and sent to the southern front in a Red

Cross unit. He died of scarlet fever in Rumania, in April,

1917, and was buried next to my father in St. Petersburg's

Alexandro-Nevsky Cemetery, which the Bolsheviks later

turned into a national artists' cemetery. Goury and myfather were both respected by the Bolsheviks—a glorifica-

tion that seems very remote now. My father had been

buried in the Novodevitchy ( the new Maiden ) Cemetery,

but was reburied in the Alexandro-Nevsky Cemetery in

1917, with Tchaikovsky, Rimsky, Dostoievsky, Gogol, and,

I think, Leskov.

Though I had not seen Goury since 1910, his death made

me very lonely. We had been together constantly as chil-

dren, and we felt that as long as we were together, all

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL 21

was well with the world. We found in each other the love

and understanding denied us by our parents, who specially

favored neither of us, though Goury was in some respects

the Benjamin of the family.

R.C. Did your parents recognize your musical talent?

LS. No. The only member of the family who believed I

had any was my uncle Alexander Ielachitch. I think that

my father judged my possibilities as a musician from his

own experience and decided that the musical life would

be too difficult for me. I could hardly blame him, however,

for before his death I had written nothing, and though I

was progressing in my piano technique, it was already clear

that I would not become a virtuoso on that instrument.

Alexander Ielachitch had married my mother's sister So-

phie five years before my father's marriage. His five chil-

dren were therefore just enough older than the four of us

to ensure that we suffered an ample amount of taunting

and misery. I still resent the way they despised us because

of their superior age, and I am even now a little triumphant

that I have outlived them all. But Uncle Ielachitch himself

was nice to me. He owned vast farms and forests in the

Samara Government, east of the Volga, where he invited

us to spend our summers with him. I composed my first

large-scale work there, incidentally, the lost—fortunately

lost—piano sonata. The four-day trips on the Volga to

Pavlovka—as the Ielachitch Samara estate was called—

were among the happiest days of my life. I first made the

trip in 1885 (sic), but of that I remember only a portrait

of the Tsar on the wall of our stateroom (which was sup-

posed to have made me cry "conductor'; for his cap and

uniform were like those of a railroad conductor). The sec-

ond excursion came eighteen years later, and my compan-

ion this time was Vladimir Rimsky-Korsakov. We heralded

his father with postcards from each of the boat's stopping


places: Rybinsk (literally, "fish town"), a white and gold

city with monastaries and glittering churches—like a set

for Tsar Saltan as you came upon it around a sudden turn

in the river; Yaroslav, with its blue and gold churches

and its yellow, Italian-style office buildings ( I saw colored

slides of Yaroslav recently in Manila at Ambassador

Bohlen's); and Nizhny-Novgorod, where, surrounded by

mendicant monks, we would walk to little booths and

drink kumiss (mare's milk).

Uncle Ielachitch, who, as I have said in our first book,

introduced me to the music of Brahms, adored Beetho-

ven and was, I think, a good guide in my early under-

standing of that composer. He had two portraits on the

wall of his study: Renan—Uncle Ielachitch was a liberal

—and Beethoven. The latter was a copy of the Waldmuller

portrait. It seemed to contradict the whole hero-worship-

ing notion of Beethoven then prevalent. ( In fact, as a small

child I did not know it was Beethoven until one day while

playing in the sand dunes of the Alexander Park I saw an

old woman whose face was exactly the face on my uncle's

wall, which led me to ask my uncle who the woman on the

wall was. ) In any case, I did not hero-worship Beethoven,

nor have I ever done so, and the nature of Beethoven's

talent and work are more 'Tinman" and more comprehensi-

ble to me than are, say, the talents and works of more

"perfect" composers like Bach and Mozart; I think I know

how Beethoven composed. 11 have little enough Beethoven

1 Though I do not understand how a man of such powers could lapse

so frequently into such banality, the octave passage for violins in the Malin-

conia is an early and tiny example of what I mean. A late and terrible ex-

ample is the first movement of the ninth symphony. How could Beethoven

have been satisfied—if he was satisfied—with such quadrilateral phrase-

building and pedantic development ( of Bars 387-400), such poor rhythmic

invention (how dull is^ TTJ I J J J J J »)

and such patently false pathos. The mere fact that I can talk about

Beethoven in this fashion proves my point, however, for about Bach I

can only say that he is so elegant, so wise, so indispensable.

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL 23

in me, alas, but some people have found I have some.

(Someone has even compared the first movement of the

Eroica, Bars 272-75, with the three chords following

Fig. 173 in Le Sacre, with Fig. 22 Renard, and with the

same musical figure in the first movement of my Symphony

in Three Movements, Bars 69-71.)

R.C. Would you describe your home in St. Petersburg?

I.S. We occupied a flat in a large old house on the Krukov

Canal: Apartment 66, Krukov Canal. The house no longer

exists, thanks to a German bomb, but Ansermet could give

a description of it more recent than my own, for he visited

my brother there in 1938. It was a four-story house. Welived on the third floor, and, at one time, Karsavina rented

the floor above us. On the other side of the canal stood a

very handsome Empire-style building, yellow in color, like

the Villa Medici in Rome, but a prison, unfortunately. The

building next to us was an apartment house also, and the

conductor Napravnik lived there.

Our flat was furnished in the usual Victorian manner,

with the usual bad paintings, the usual mauve upholstery,

etc., but with an unusual library and two grand pianos. To

recall it gives me no pleasure, however. I do not like to

remember my childhood, and the four walls of my and

Goury's room represent my most abiding impression of

home. Our room was like Petroushka's cell, and most of

my time was spent there. I was allowed out-of-doors only

after my parents had put me through a medical examina-

tion, and I was considered too frail to participate in any

sports or games when I was out. I suspect even now that

my hatred of sports is my jealousy at having been deprived

of them.

A new life began for me after the death of my father,

when I began to live more in accordance with my own

wishes. I even left home altogether on one occasion, leav-


ing my mother the traditional note, to the effect that life

at 66 Krukov Canal was impossible. I sought refuge with

a recently married Ielachitch cousin, a man devoted to

any form of revolution or protestation, but after a few days

my mother managed to fall ill enough to force me to come

back. She did behave slightly less egotistically after that,

however, and her delight in torturing me seemed slightly

less intense. I continued to live at home during the first

year of my marriage, then moved to another apartment

on the English Prospekt, my last residence in St. Peters-

burg.

TEACHERS

R.C. Would you describe your piano lessons with Mile.

Kashperova?

Z.S. She was an excellent pianist and a blockhead, a not

unusual combination. By which I mean that her aesthetics

and her bad tastes were impregnable, but her pianism of

a high order. She was well known in St. Petersburg, and

though her name would not appear in Grove or Riemann,

I think she might have been listed in a Russian dictionary

of the time. She talked endlessly about her teacher, Anton

Rubinstein, and I was attentive to this because I had seen

Rubinstein in his coffin. ( It was a sight I shall never forget.

I was somewhat prepared for it, because at an even earlier

age I had seen the dead Emperor Alexander III—a yellow,

waxen, uniformed doll—lying in state in the Sts. Peter and

Paul Cathedral. Rubinstein was white, but with a thick

black mane; he was in full dress, as though for a concert,

and his hands were folded over a cross; I did not see

Tchaikovsky in his coffin, incidentally, because my parents

thought the weather too dangerously bad for me to risk

going out.) I learned to play the Mendelssohn G-Minor

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL 25

Concerto with Mile. Kashperova, and many sonatas by

Clementi and Mozart, as well as sonatas and other pieces

by Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, and Schumann. Chopin

was forbidden, and she tried to discourage my interest in

Wagner. Nevertheless, I knew all Wagner's works from the

piano scores, and when I was sixteen or seventeen, and

at last had the money to buy them, from the orchestral

scores. We played Rimsky's operas together, four-hands,

and I remember deriving much pleasure from Christmas

Eve this way. Mile. Kashperova's only idiosyncrasy as a

teacher was in forbidding me all use of pedals; I had to

sustain with my fingers, like an organist—an omen, perhaps,

as I have never been a pedal composer. I am most in

Kashperova's debt, however, for something she would not

have appreciated. Her narrowness and her formulae greatly

encouraged the supply of bitterness that accumulated in

my soul, until, in my mid-twenties, I broke loose and

revolted from her and from every stultification in mystudies, my schools, and my family. The real answer to

your questions about my childhood is that it was a period

of waiting for the moment when I could send everyone

and everything connected with it to hell.

R.C. What schools did you attend in St. Petersburg?

I.S. I attended a government school, the Second St. Peters-

burg Gymnasium, until I was fourteen or fifteen. From

there I went to the Gourevitch Gymnasium, a private

school where Youry had been before me. The Gourevitch

Gymnasium was about eight miles from our house, in

a neighbourhood called "peski"—"the sands"—and these

eight miles kept me in constant debt. Always too late in

the mornings for the tram, I would have to take a fiacre

and pay forty or fifty kopecks. But the fiacre rides were

the only thing about school I liked. Especially in winter,


and on the way home, what a pleasure it was to drive

through the Nevsky Prospekt in a sleigh, protected by a

net from the dirty snow kicked up by the horse, and then,

at home, to warm myself in front of our big white porcelain

stove.

The Gourevitch Gymnasium was divided into a "classi-

cal" and a "realschule" My own curriculum belonged to

the former: history, Latin, Greek, Russian, and French lit-

eratures, mathematics. I was of course a very bad pupil,

and I hated this school as I did all my schools, profoundly

and forever.

R.C. Did you have any sympathetic teachers?

I.S. My mathematics professor in this same Gourevitch

Gymnasium—a man called Woolf—did understand me, I

think. He was an ex-Hussar officer with a real talent for

mathematics, but he had been, and still was, a drunkard.

(Another of my professors was a drunkard too, a man in

perpetual disgrace who would walk to the window, turn

his back to us, and steal a nip from a little bottle in his

coat pocket; the other boys mocked him cruelly. ) Professor

Woolf was also an amateur musician. He knew that I com-

posed—I had already been reproached for it by the school

director—and he helped, protected, and encouraged me.

UNIVERSITY

R.C. What are your memories of St. Petersburg Univer-

sity?

I.S. As attendance at lectures was optional, I opted not to

attend, and in all my four years there I probably did not

hear more than fifty. I have only a vague and uninterested

memory of the university. I read criminal law and legal

philosophy, and I was interested in the theoretical and

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL 2J

abstract questions of both, but by the time I entered the

university, so much of my time was spent with the Rimsky-

Korsakov family I could hardly do justice to my studies.

I can now recall only two incidents connected with my life

there. I was walking through the Kazansky Place one after-

noon in the politically tense months following the Russo-

Japanese war, when a group of students began to stage a

protest. The police were prepared, however, and the prot-

estants were arrested, myself with them. I was detained

seven hours, but seventy years will not erase the memory

of my fears. The other incident occurred during the last

spring cramming season, when, realizing that I would

never pass one of my examinations, I proposed to exchange

names with Nicolai Yussupov, that he might take my ex-

amination and I one of his: we were better in each other's

subjects. The ruse was never detected, because our faces

were quite unknown to the professors, but poor Nicolai—

whose brother later killed Rasputin—died shortly after

passing my exam, in a duel in Tashkent.

R.C. What did you read in your university years?

I.S. Russian literature mostly, and the literature of other

countries in Russian translation. Dostoievsky was always

my hero. Of the new writers, I liked Gorky most and dis-

liked most Andreyev. The Scandinavians then so popular

—Lagerlof and Hamsun—did not appeal to me at all, but I

admired Strindberg and, of course, Ibsen. Ibsen's plays

were as popular in Russia in those years as Tchaikovsky's

music. Sudermann and Hauptmann were also in great

vogue then, and Dickens, and Mark Twain (whose daugh-

ter I later knew in Hollywood ) , and Scott, whose Ivanhoe

(pronounced in Russian as a four-syllable paroxytone—

Ivanhoye ) was as popular a children's book as it ever was

in the English-speaking countries.


CONCERTS IN ST. PETERSBURG

R.C. You often mention the St. Petersburg concert series,

"Evenings of Contemporary Music." What music did you

hear there?

IS, First of all, my own. Nicolas Richter played my early

piano sonata there, and this was the first music of mine

to be performed in public. It was, I suppose, an inept imi-

tation of late Beethoven. I myself performed there too, as

accompanist to a singer, a certain Miss Petrenko, in myGorodetsky songs. Works by young Russian composers

were in the majority, of course, but French music—the

quartets and songs of Debussy and Ravel, and various

pieces by Dukas and dlndy—was also promoted.2 Brahms

was played, too, and Reger. Like the "Monday Evening

Concerts" in Los Angeles, these St. Petersburg concerts, in

spite of their name, tried to match the new with the old.

This was important, and rare, for so many organizations

are dedicated to new music, and so few to the centuries

before Bach. I heard Monteverdi there for the first time,

in an arrangement by dlndy, I think, and Couperin and

Monteclair; and Bach was performed in quantity.

The people I met at these concerts were also a great

part of the interest. All the composers, the poets, and the

artists of St. Petersburg were there, and also the intelligent

amateurs—like my friends Ivan Pokrovsky and Stepan

Mitusov, who were always aware of the newest art devel-

opments in Berlin and Paris.

2 When I met d'lndy at a rehearsal of Le Sacre in 1921 1 told him I had

heard an amount of his music in St. Petersburg in my youth, but he proba-

bly understood that it had been part of the background that had provoked

me into writing Le Sacre, for he said nothing.

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL 29

R.C. Were there any "advanced" orchestral concerts in St.

Petersburg?

I.S. No, the programs of the Imperial Symphony were very

much like the programs of American orchestras today:

standard repertory, and from time to time a piece of sec-

ond-rate, locally composed music. The symphonies of

Bruckner and Brahms were considered new music still and

therefore were rarely and very timidly played. Belayev's

"Russian Symphony Concerts" were more interesting, but

they concentrated too much on the Russian "Five." Inci-

dentally, I knew Belayev, and I often met him at concerts.

He was the great music patron of his time—a kind of Rus-

sian Rockefeller who played the violin. His Editions

Belayev in Leipzig had published my Faune et Bergere—

probably on Rimsky's advice, since Glazunov, his other

adviser, would not have recommended it.3 Once I saw him

stand up in his box—he was a tall man, with very artistic

hair—and stare with amazement at the stage where

Koussevitzky had just come on carrying his double bass to

play a solo. Belayev turned to me and said, "Until now,

such things have been seen only in circuses."

R.C. What did you love most in Russia?

I.S. The violent Russian spring that seemed to begin in an

hour and was like the whole earth cracking. That was the

most wonderful event of every year of my childhood.

3 I am not being unfair to Glazunov; he was so consumed with animosity

that when I saw him for the last time, backstage after a concert he con-

ducted in Paris in 1935, and said, "Greetings to you, Alexander

Konstantinovitch," all he could do was to look dour, half offer his hand,

and say nothing.

II. DIAGHILEV AND HIS DANCERS

R.C. Do you remember your first attendance at a ballet

performance?

I.S. At the age of seven or eight I was taken to see The

Sleeping Beauty. I realize now that I was older than this

when I saw A Life for the Tsar, which contradicts what

I said in our first series of conversations, that the latter was

my first attendance at a theatrical-musical performance. I

was enchanted by the ballet, but I had been prepared for

what I saw, for ballet was an important part of our culture

and a familiar subject to me from my earliest childhood.

Therefore I was able to identify the dance positions and

steps, and I knew the plot and the music long in advance.

Moreover, Petipa, the choreographer, was a friend of myfather's, and I had seen him several times myself. Of the

performance itself, I remember only my musical impres-

sions, however, and perhaps those are really my parents'

impressions of my impressions, repeated to me afterward.

But I do know that I was excited by the dance and that

I applauded it with all my strength. If I could transport

myself back to that night seventy years ago I would do

so only to satisfy my curiosity about the musical tempi,

for I am always interested in the question of tempo in

other periods.

As I grew up I became aware that the ballet was petri-

fying—that it was, in fact, already quite rigidly conven-

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL 31

tional. I could not regard it as an exploitable musical

medium, of course, and I would have been quite incredu-

lous had anyone suggested that a modern movement in

the arts was to be born through it. But would that move-

ment have taken place without Diaghilev? I do not think

so.

PAVLOVA

R.C. What ballet dancer did you most admire in your

student years?

LS. Anna Pavlova. She was never a member of Diaghilev's

company, however, though Diaghilev had very much

wanted her to join. I met her in December, 1909, at her

home in St. Petersburg. Diaghilev had asked her to invite

me to a party, hoping that after she had met me she might

agree to dance the part of the Firebird. I remember that

Benois and Fokine were there that night too, and that wedrank much champagne. But whatever Pavlova thought

of me personally, she did not dance in The Firebird. The

reasons for her refusal were, I think, my Scherzo Fantas-

tique and Fireworks. She considered these pieces horribly

decadent. ( "Decadent" and "modern" were interchange-

able then, whereas "decadent" now very often means "not

modern enough.")

The lines of Pavlova's form and her mobile expression

were ever beautiful to behold, but the dance itself was

always the same, and quite devoid of constructive interest.

In fact, I remember no difference in her dance from the

first time I saw it, in St. Petersburg in 1905 or 1906, to the

last time, which was in Paris in the 1930s. Pavlova was an

artiste, but of an art far removed from the world of the

Diaghilev Ballet.


R.C. Who taught you most about the technique of the

dance?

LS. Maestro Cecchetti, the elder of the Ballet and the final

authority for every dance step in every ballet we did.

Everyone in the company, from Nijinsky to the apprentices,

venerated him. He was a very cozy man, and I had become

friends with him already in St. Petersburg. His knowledge

was limited to the classical dance, of course, and he there-

fore opposed the trend of our Ballet as a whole, but it

was precisely his academicism, not his aesthetics, that

Diaghilev required. He remained the company's dance-

conscience through its entire existence. There was a Si-

gnora Cecchetti too, also a dancer, and as like her husband

as a twin. Diaghilev called her "the Cecchetti in petticoats."

I once saw her dance in crinolines and with a great papier-

mache boat on her head. Imagine how delighted I was

when Cecchetti agreed to dance the Magician in Petrou-

shka. We didn't have to paste a false beard on himl

FOKINE

R.C. Do you remember Fokine's choreography for the

original Firebird and Petroushka?

LS. I do, but I didn't really like the dance movement of

either ballet. The female dancers in The Firebird, the Prin-

cesses, were insipidly sweet, while the male dancers were

the ne plus ultra of brute masculinity: in the Kastchei

scene, they sat on the floor kicking their legs in an incredi-

bly stupid manner. I prefer Balanchine's choreography for

the 1945 version of the Firebird suite to the whole Fokine

ballet ( and the music too: the music of the complete ballet

is too long and patchy in quality).

Nor did Fokine realize my ideas for Petroushka, though

I suspect that this time the fault was rather with Diaghilev

than with Fokine. I conceived the Charlatan as a character

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL 33

out of E. T. A. Hoffmann, a lackey in a tightly modeled

blue frac with gold stars, and not at all as a Russian Met-

ropolitan. The flute music, too, is Weber-like, or Hoffmann-

like, not Russian "Five." Also, I had thought of the Moor

as a kind of Wilhelm Busch caricature and not as the merely

mechanical comic-relief character he is usually made out

to be. Another of my ideas was that Petroushka should

watch the dances of the Fourth Tableau ( the Coachmen,

the Nurses, etc.) from a hole in his cell and that we, the

audience, should see them, too, from the perspective of his

cell. I never did like the full-stage dance carrousel at this

point of the drama. And Fokine's choreography was am-

biguous at the most important moment. Petroushka's

ghost, as I conceived the story, is the real Petroushka, and

his appearance at the end makes die Petroushka of the pre-

ceding play a mere doll. His gesture is not one of triumph

or protest, as is so often said, but a nose-thumbing ad-

dressed to the audience. The significance of this gesture

is not and never was clear in Fokine's staging. One great

invention of Fokine's, however, was the rigid arm move-

ment that Nijinsky was to make such an unforgettable ges-

ture.

Fokine was easily the most disagreeable man I have ever

worked with. In fact, with Glazunov, he was the most dis-

agreeable man I have ever met; but Glazunov was a time-

to-time drunkard, which redeemed him—from time to time;

he would lock his door for two-week binges on Chateau

YquemI Imagine bingeing on Chateau Yquem! I was never

a friend of Fokine's, not even in our first years together,

for I was a partisan of Cecchetti's, and Cecchetti was for

him the merest academician. Diaghilev agreed with me,

however, that his dances for Prince Igor suggested that

he was the best qualified of our choreographers to deal

with The Firebird. Then, after The Firebird and Petrou-


shka, I had little to do with him. He was spoiled by his

success in America and ever after wore the "I-have-made-

an-American-kilT look. I saw him last with Ida Rubinstein.

He was to have choreographed my Baiser de la Fee for

her, but finally Bronislava Nijinska did it, and I was much

relieved. After that and until the end of his life ( 1940) I

received complaints from him about business or royalty

matters connected with The Firebird, which he would ac-

tually refer to as my "musical accompaniment" to his

"choreographic poem."

NIJINSKY AND NIJINSKA

R.C. Have you any further recollections to add to what

you have already written about Vaslav Nijinsky?

I.S. When Diaghilev introduced me to Nijinsky—it was in

St. Petersburg in 1909—I was aware of him as an extraor-

dinary physical being. I was aware, too, of curious absences

in his personality. I liked his shy manner and his soft, Pol-

ish speech, and he was immediately very open and affec-

tionate with me—but he was always that. Later, when I

knew him better, I thought him childishly spoiled and im-

pulsive. Later, too, I came to understand the absences as a

kind of stigmata; I could not imagine that they would so

soon and so tragically destroy him. I often think of

Nijinsky in his final years, a captive in his own mind, his

most perfect gift of expression in movement stricken,

immobile.

Already a celebrity when I first knew him, Nijinsky was

to become even more celebrated shortly afterward because

of a scandal. Diaghilev had taken charge of his costuming

—they were living together—with the result that Nijinsky

appeared at the Imperial Theater in the tightest tights any-

one had ever seen ( in fact, an athletic support padded with

handkerchiefs), and little else. The Tsar's mother had at-

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL 35

tended a performance and was shocked. Diaghilev and

Prince Wolkonsky, the director of the theater and a man of

similar sensibilities, were thought to have conspired against

public decency. The Tsar himself was shocked. He alluded

to the matter in conversation with Diaghilev but was so

curtly answered that Diaghilev was never thereafter in

good official odor. I discovered this for myself when

Diaghilev asked me to approach Ambassador Izvolsky in

an attempt to secure a passport for a dancer of conscrip-

tion age. When Izvolsky understood my request to be on

Diaghilev's behalf he became quite coldly diplomatic, ( But

I was often Diaghilev's ambassador in later years, espe-

cially his "financial" ambassador—or, as he called me, his

"tax-collector.")

To return to the Imperial Theater scandal, the truth is

that the exhibitionist was not Nijinsky but Diaghilev.

Nijinsky was always very serious and high-minded and,

in my judgment, never conscious of his performances from

Diaghilev's point of view. I was even more certain of this

later, in Paris, when he danced The Afternoon of a Faun.

This ballet's famous representation of the act of love, and

its exhibition of sexual organs, was entirely Diaghilev's

idea. Even so, Nijinsky's performance was such marvel-

ously concentrated art that only a fool could have been

shocked by it—but then, I adored the ballet myself.

Nijinsky was wholly without guile. More than that, he

was naively—appallingly—honest. He never understood

that in Society one does not always say all that one thinks.

At a party in London, some time before the Sacre du

Printemps premiere, Lady Ripon proposed a parlor game

in which we were all to decide what sort of animal each

other most resembled—a dangerous game. Lady Ripon ini-

tiated it herself by saying that "Diaghilev looks like a bull-

dog and Stravinsky like a reynard. Now, M. Nijinsky, what


do you think I look like?" Nijinsky thought a moment, then

spoke the awful, exact truth: "Vous, Madame—chameau"—just the three words; Nijinsky did not speak muchFrench. Lady Ripon did not expect that, of course, and

in spite of her repeating, "A camel? How amusing! I de-

clare. Really? A camel?" she was flustered all evening.

My own disappointment with Nijinsky was due to the

fact that he did not know the musical alphabet. He never

understood musical meters and he had no very certain

sense of tempo. You may imagine from this the rhythmic

chaos that was he Sacre du Printemps, and especially the

chaos of the last dance, where poor Mile. Piltz, the Sacri-

ficial Maiden, was not even aware of the changing bars.

Nor did Nijinsky make any attempt to understand my ownchoreographic ideas for he Sacre. In the Danses des Ado-

lescents, for example, I had imagined a row of almost

motionless dancers. Nijinsky made of this piece a big jump-

ing match.

I do not say that Nijinsky's creative imagination lacked

abundance; on the contrary, it was almost too rich. The

point is simply that he did not know music, and therefore

his notion of the relation of dance to it was primitive. To

some extent this might have been remedied by education,

for of course he was musical. But at the time he was made

chief choreographer of the Ballet he was hopelessly incom-

petent in musical technique. He believed that the choreog-

raphy should re-emphasize the musical beat and pattern

through constant co-ordination. In effect, this restricted

the dance to rhythmic duplication of the music and made

of it an imitation. Choreography, as I conceive it, must

realize its own form, one independent of the musical form,

though measured to the musical unit. Its construction will

be based on whatever correspondences the choreographer

may invent, but it must not seek merely to duplicate the

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL 37

line and beat of the music. I do not see how one can be a

choreographer unless, like Balanchine, one is a musician

first.

If Nijinsky was the least capable musically of my choreo-

graphic collaborators, his talent was elsewhere—and one

talent such as he had is enough. To call him a dancer is

not enough, however, for he was an even greater dramatic

actor. His beautiful, but certainly not handsome, face

could become the most powerful actor's mask I have ever

seen, and as Petroushka he was the most exciting human

being I have ever seen on a stage.

I recently discovered a Nijinsky letter—addressed to

me in Russia but forwarded to Switzerland, where I was

then staying. It is a document of such astounding inno-

cence—if Nijinsky hadn't written it, I think only a char-

acter in Dostoievsky might have. It seems incredible to

me even now that he was so unaware of the politics and

sexual jealousies and motives within the Ballet. I never saw

Nijinsky again after he Sacre du Printemps, so, in fact,

I knew him for only four years. But those four years were

the great age of the Ballet and I was with him then almost

every day. I do not recall what I answered, but Diaghilev

had already returned to Russia, and when I saw him on

his next trip to Paris, Massine had "replaced" poor Nijin-

sky.

Tuesday, gth December 1913

1 Hidegkuti ut $1 (Budapest

)

Dear Igor: I cannot hide from you what has happened to methese last months. You know that I went to South America andhave not been in Europe for four months. These four monthscost me dearly in money and health. My room with board cost

150 francs daily. I did not earn this money from Serge, however,

but was obliged to take it from my own capital. What did Serge

do all this time while we were in South America? I do not know.


I wrote him many times without receiving any answer. And I

needed an answer, too, as I had worked on two new ballets—

Joseph and Potiphar, by Strauss, and another one, with Bach's

music. All the preparatory work for these ballets was completed

and 1 had only to put them in rehearsal. I could not rehearse in

America because of the terrible heat, from which we almost

died. How I managed to stay in good health up to the last

evening there I do not know. But though I was lucky in America,

here I have been ill for two months. Now I am all right.

I did not send you an invitation to my wedding as I knew you

would not come, and I did not write you because I had so muchto do. Please excuse me. I went with my wife to her parents'

home in Budapest and there I immediately sent a telegram to

Serge asking him when we could see each other. The answer to

my telegram was a letter from Grigoriev 1 informing me that I

shall not be asked to stage any ballets this season, and that I amnot needed as an artist.

Please write to me whether this is true. I do not believe that

Serge can act that meanly to me. Serge owes me a lot of money.

I have received nothing for two years, neither for my dancing

nor for my staging Faune, Jeux, and Le Sacre du Printemps. I

worked for the Ballet without a contract. If it is true that Serge

does not want to work with me—then I have lost everydung. Youunderstand the situation I am in. I cannot imagine what has

happened, what is the reason for his behavior. Please ask Serge

what is the matter, and write to me about it. In all the newspa-

pers of Germany, Paris, and London, etc., it is reported that I amnot working any more with Diaghilev. But die whole press is

against him (including the feuilletons) . They also say that I amgathering a company of my own. In truth, I am receiving prop-

ositions from eveiy side, and the biggest of these comes from a

very rich businessman, who offers one million francs to organize

a new Diaghilev2 Russian Ballet—they wish me to have sole

artistic direction and large sums of money to commission decors,

music, etc. But I won't give them a definite answer before I

have news from you.

1 Serge Grigoriev, the rigisseur of the Ballet.

2 Sic.

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL 39

My numerous friends send me letters of revolt and rage

against Diaghilev—and propositions to help me and join me in

my new enterprise. I hope you will not forget me and will an-

swer my letter immediately.

Your loving Vaslav.

Regards to your wife and to all I know. V.

R.C. Who, then, was your most successful choreographer

in the Diaghilev period?

LS. Bronislava Nijinska, Nijinsky's sister. Her choreog-

raphy for the original productions of Renard (1922) and

Noces (1923) pleased me more than any other works of

mine interpreted by the Diaghilev troupe. Her conception

of Noces in blocks and masses, and her acrobatic Renard,

coincided with my ideas, as well as with the real—not

realistic—decors. The set of Noces was a beeswax yellow,

and the costumes were brown peasant costumes, instead

of the hideously un-Russian reds, greens, and blues one

usually sees in foreign stagings of Russian plays. Renard

was also a real Russian satire. The animal saluted very

like the Russian Army (Orwell would have liked this),

and there was always an underlying significance to their

movements. Nijinska's Renard was superior in every wayto the 1929 revival, though the latter was ruined chiefly

by some jugglers Diaghilev had borrowed from a circus—

an idea of his that did not succeed at all.

Poor Bronislava had no luck with Diaghilev. Be-

cause her face was bony and interesting, instead of doll-

like, Diaghilev wouldn't let her dance the Ballerina in

Petroushka. And as a dancer she was second to none. In-

deed, the Nijinskys—brother and sister together—were the

best dancing pair imaginable. Then, later, after Nijinsky's

marriage, Diaghilev could not overcome his prejudice. She

looked like Nijinsky, was even shaped like him—with the

same big shoulders. She was a constant reminder to him


of her brother. It pained Diaghilev doubly, too, that this

person who dared look like Nijinsky was a woman. You

can hardly imagine how indomitable was Diaghilev's sex-

ual prejudice. He had argued for years to convince methat the exclusive love of women was morbid (though I

don't know how he could have known very much about

that), that I was an incomplete artist because . . .

"morbid." He would draw cartoons on restaurant table-

cloths of steatopygous and gourd-geously mammiferous

women—they looked like Dubuffet madonnas—argue

about Socrates, Jesus, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo

( what a chaos of pederasty is Michelangelo's Conversion of

St. Paul—even including the horses—and how unnecessary

in any case to Paul's conversion), and go on about "all

great artists," etc. He would describe his own latest

mignon in the most gratifying terms, and quote Verlaine:

"Demon femelle . . . ," etc. At the same time, however,

he was showman enough to know how to emphasize the

beauty of the female body in the ballet.

Poor Bronislava's sex, looks, and name were against her.

I regretted this because, except for her and Fokine, the

choreographers of my ballets were not so much dance com-

posers as dance performers. They had been elevated to

the position of choreographers not by education or experi-

ence but through being Diaghilev's eromenoi.3

3 It is almost impossible to describe the perversity of Diaghilev's entou-

rage—a kind of homosexual Swiss Guard—and the incidents and stories

concerning it. I remember a rehearsal for the revival of Renard, in Monaco

in 1929, at which our pianist—a handsome fijicus of Diaghilev's—suddenly

began looking very intently beyond the music rack. I followed his gaze to a

Monegasque soldier in a tricorne, and then asked what the matter was. Heanswered, "I long to surrender myself to him."

Another of Diaghilev's proteges was discovered nude by the police be-

neath a bridge near Nice, and when one of the policemen said, "Ou vous

etes un vicieux ou vous etes fou," he is supposed to have replied, "Je suis

surement vicieux." And so on.

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL 41

MASSINE

R.C. Do you remember Massine's choreography for the

first Pulcinella?

I.S. I do and, on the whole, I considered it very good. It

was sometimes mechanical, but only the variation move-

ment was contradictory to the music. Massine had already

choreographed the Variations before I had scored the

music, and Diaghilev had told him I would use a large

orchestra with harps. Instead of this, my orchestra, as you

know, is a solo woodwind quartet.

In 1914—after Nijinsky's marriage—Diaghilev returned

from Russia with Leonid Massine. Massine's first ballet was

Strauss's Legend of Joseph. Of my music, besides Ful-

cinella, Massine did the choreography of The 'Nightingale.

The performances of the latter were not good, however,

because of insufficient orchestra rehearsals. There was a

lack of co-ordination between pit and stage, and the result

was unworthy of the best standards of the company.

Later, Massine did the choreography for the revival of

he Sacre du Printemps. I thought this excellent—incompa-

rably clearer than Nijinsky's.

THE DIAGHILEV BALLET AND DIAGHILEV

R.C. Are there any other dancers and choreographers you

would like to mention?

I.S. I should mention Idzikovsky, the great jumper and,

after Nijinsky, the greatest Petroushka; Woizikovsky;

Lopokova, of the perfect technique; Karsavina, the lady of

the Ballet, the first ballerina in Petroushka, and the first

Firebird (though she should have been the Princess and

Pavlova the Firebird ) ; Tchernicheva, a beautiful Firebird


Princess and a beautiful woman too—she had infatuated

Alfonso XIII and was the only woman who had attracted

Ravel; Piltz, the Russian with the German name who

danced in The Firebird with Fokina and Tchernicheva

and was the star of the first Sacre du Printemps; Sokolova,

who danced the revival of he Sacre; Lifar, who was so

beautiful as Apollo; Adolphe Bolm, who choreographed

the first Apollo and who became my close friend in Amer-

ica; George Balanchine, who choreographed the first

European Apollo (I had met him in April, 1923, in Nice,

just as I was finishing Noces; in fact, Balanchine had come

from Russia with his wife Danilova expressly to attend the

premiere of Noces).

I see that while attempting to remember the "dancers

of the Russian Ballet" I have actually said more about

Diaghilev himself and his abnormal psychology (though

I have not exaggerated the latter ) than about the Terpsi-

chorean arts and artists in his company. But this was

inevitable, since Diaghilev was more strong-willed than all

his artists and since he controlled every detail of every

ballet he produced.

Diaghilev was sometimes possessed by very odd and

impractical ideas, and as he was a stubborn man, many

hours of my (and his) life were spent in trying to argue

him out of eccentric notions. That I was not always

successful, from my point of view, is illustrated by his use

of jugglers in Renard. I did win in one important case

though—L'Histoire du Soldat. Diaghilev could not bear

the name VHistoire du Soldat because his company had

not produced it (as indeed it could not have done in 1918,

temporarily dissolved as it was in the war). But in the

early 1920s, he suddenly decided to stage it. His plan was

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL 43

eccentric. The dancers were to go about wearing adver-

tisements, American sidewalk walking-advertisements,

"sandwich men," as they are called, or pickets. Massine

would eventually have been blamed for the choreography

of this undanceable ballet, but it was all Diaghilevs idea.

Diaghilev was in no sense an intellectual. He was much

too sensual for that; besides, intellectuals never have any

real taste—and has anyone ever had so much taste as

Diaghilev? He was a deeply cultured man, however—

a

scholar in certain areas of art history, and an authority

on Russian painting.4 He had been a bibliophile all his

life, also, and his Russian library was one of the finest in the

world. But his mind was so preyed upon by superstition

that he was incapable of true intellectual examination. At

times I thought him pathologically superstitious. He car-

ried amulets; he pronounced talismanic formulas; like Dr.

Johnson he counted paving stones; he avoided thirteens,

black cats, open ladders. Vassili, his domestic—who was al-

ways by his side holding Turkish towels, or hairbrushes;

but you know Cocteau's caricature—Vassili was made to

perform what Diaghilev regarded as the more orthodox

superstition of prayer; for, while he was not a believer, he

did not want to exclude the Christian possibility alto-

gether. Vassili once told me that when they were en route

to America in 1916 Diaghilev was so frightened by rough

seas that he made him go down on his knees and pray,

while he, Diaghilev, lay on his bed, worrying for both—

4 Diaghilev once told me about his visit to Tolstoy to see Tolstoy's

old family portraits. The old man received him cordially and showed himaround his gallery with a big lantern, but his only real interest in Diaghilev

was as a checkers opponent. He asked Diaghilev if he played checkers, andDiaghilev said he did, so terrified was he, though he had never played in

his life. They played, and of course Diaghilev did everything wrong.

Tolstoy said, "Young man, you should have told the truth right away; nowgo upstairs and take tea."


a real division of labor. I remember a trip across the Eng-

lish Channel with him myself, and how he kept looking at

a barometer, crossing himself, and saying, "Salvo, Salvo."

Diaghilev feared the iettatore and would make the sign

with the first two fingers of his right hand against its spell.

Once when we were talking together in a theater I was

surprised to see his right hand occupied with the sign

while he continued to talk to me, so to speak, with his

left hand. "Seriosha, what are you doing?" I asked. Hepointed to three men behind him and said that one of

them had the malocchio. I looked and saw that he was

mistaken and told him so, but he would not abandon the

digital counterinfluence until the three men had gone.

Diaghilev was self-destructively vain. He starved him-

self for the sake of his figure. I remember him—the next

to last time I saw him—opening his overcoat and proudly

showing me how slender he had become. This was for the

benefit of one of his last proteges—a modest, self-effacing,

and utterly ruthless careerist who was about as fond of

Diaghilev as Herod was of children. Diaghilev was a

diabetic, but he was not saved by insulin (he feared in-

jections and preferred to take his chances with the dis-

ease ) . I do not know the medical explanation of his death,

but I do know that this event was a terrible shock to me,

the more so because I had broken with him over Le Baiser

de la Fee (which, as I have said, Ida Rubinstein had

staged, and which he had very bitterly criticized), and

because we were not reconciled when he died.

I have recently imcovered a packet of letters and other

documents addressed to me at the time of Diaghilev's

death. One of the documents is a German newspaper

describing Diaghilev as "ein beriihmter Tanzer." I quote

two of the letters.

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL 45

Antequeruela Alta 11

Granada

22nd August 1929

Bien cher Igor, I am profoundly moved by the death of

Diaghilev and it is my wish to write to you before I speak to any-

one else. What a terrible loss for you. Of all the admirable

things he did, the first was his revelation of you. We owe him

that above all. And without you, besides, the Ballet couldn't

have existed. . . . However, it is a consolation that our poor

friend died without surviving his work. I always remember his

fears during the war that someone might come and take his

place. Later we understood how useless were such fears, for of

course no one could ever take his place. And now I beg one

favor of you: please give my most passionate condolences to

the head of the Diaghilev Ballet, whoever that is now. I ask you

to do this because I do not know anyone there now who could

receive them. I embrace you with all my old and true affection,

Manuel de Falla

P.S. I hope you received my last letter, which I sent registered,

thinking you might be absent.

The second letter is from Walter Nouvel, the secretary

of the Ballet and Diaghilev's most intimate friend since

they were students together at St. Petersburg University.

NouveFs sensibilities were similar to Diaghilev's (indeed,

he used to say, "I like Italians; they recognize one right

away; everyone in Italy always says, 'Grazie, tante to

me."). His calm and intelligence saved the Ballet more

than once. He was a good musician too, and to me person-

ally the kindest of friends.

Paris, 30th August iQ2g

My dear Igor,

I was touched to my soul by your deeply-felt letter. We are

sharing the same sorrow. I am bereft of a man to whom I wastied by a friendship of forty years. But I am happy today that

I never failed to be faithful to this friendship. Many things


united us and many things separated us. Often I suffered from

him, often I was revolted by him, but now that he is in the

grave all is forgotten and all forgiven. And I understand nowthat no ordinary measure of the conduct of human relations

could be applied to so exceptional a man. He lived and died

"one of the favored of God." But he was a heathen, and a

Dionysian heathen, not an Apollonian. He loved all earthly

things: earthly love, earthly passions, earthly beauty. The sky

was for him no more than a beautiful cupola above a beautiful

earth.

This does not mean that he was without mysticism. No, but

his mysticism was that of a pagan, not of a Christian, order.

With him, Faith was replaced by a deep superstition; he had

no fear of God but was terrified before the elements and their

mysteries; he possessed no Christian humility but was instead a

man of sensual, almost childlike, emotions and feelings. His

death, a pagan's death, was beautiful. He died in love and

beauty and under the smiles of those two gods he swore by, and

served his whole life, with such passion. Such a man must be

loved by Christ.

I embrace you, Walter Nouvel

These are four letters from Diaghilev to me:

1st November, 1914

Firenze

Quattro viale Torricelli

You awful pig.

I wire you that I have signed the American contract, and

that Mestrovic5 answered that he expected me in Rome in

5 The ballet Diaghilev had planned with Mestrovic was Liturgie. I went

to Rome for two weeks as his guest to discuss the project with him and with

Mestrovic, but I refused to do the ballet, both because I disapproved of the

idea of presenting the Mass as a ballet spectacle, and because Diaghilev

wanted me to compose it and Les Noces for the same price.

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL 47

November. And you, not a word. You force me, an old man,

to take to my pen. We stay here until 10th November, then

go to Rome. We were in Ravenna and were overwhelmed by

this magnificent cemetery. I have received a mad telegram

from Misia saying she will not leave Paris because it is now the

most beautiful city in the world. I have received a telegram

from Nijinsky, too. He has no right to leave Budapest for the

moment because of the war. Prokofiev is working with Gorodet-

sky and it seems he will finish his piano concerto. Koussevitzky

is going to conduct in Rome and I shall see him. I received

from your Mr. Fokine an amiable inquiry about my affairs. The

Fokines are at Biarritz. Well, and you, which tableau of Noces

have you reached?

Write, Dog.

Yours, Sebiosha

Grand Hotel, Roma,

25th November 1Q14

Dear Igor, Our concert did not work out for some last-minute

reason. When I originally proposed it to San Martino6 he

jumped up on his divan in transports and shouted, "But I will

take Stravinsky with four hands." Then when I saw him next

time he told me how good it was to be an absolute Tsar and

boasted that he could invite you without asking anybody. All

details were settled and the concert arranged for the third of

January when suddenly I received a letter with the following:

".. . as to the fee, you can imagine in what an embarrassing

condition the Academy finds itself in a season like this, whenit has so few resources. On the other hand, Stravinsky is young

and as he is not trying to make a regular conductor s career I

hope he will be satisfied with a very modest sum which could

be between six and seven hundred francs." I hastened to San

Martino and explained to him that the train ticket costs 240

francs and your sojourn in Rome seven days at 50 francs a day,

6 President of the Santa Cecilia.


350, id est 600 francs, the sum he proposed. All that I can dois to invite you to stay with me so you will have no expenses in

Rome, and argue you into accepting 1200 francs. He agreed

with me and said that to get the money he will shrink his

budget (1!) (he has also invited Strauss, Debussy, and

Koussevitzky from Moscow and others) so that the concert

could take place. I even spoke with him and with their

conductor about the order of the program and I insisted

that they give you twelve rehearsals. Then I received this

note from him:

"My dear friend, as to Stravinsky's concert I regret very

much to have to cancel it for reasons which I will explain

to you with my own voice on my return."

He went for three days to Turin and I shall see him at Sun-

day's concert. I will propose to him the following: to take on

your traveling expenses myself and ask him to pay you 1000

francs. If this also fails to work out, then to hell with him.

We absolutely must see each other. You must come here for

two weeks—the best time would be from about the twentieth of

December. If you pass the holidays here, you can have a little,

quiet room in our apartment, and one eats not badly here. But

you must come: our plan with Mestrovic is progressing. Mestro-

vic is a timid man with an exaggerated amour-propre and a dis-

trust of everything one does. He has genius in fulfilling his work,

but his advice is mediocre. His intentions are always good, and

he is inflamed by ideas. But we must take care ourselves about

everything. Your being at such a distance makes this all impossi-

bly difficult. I work together with him and Massine; bless us, I

want Massine to stage this ballet!

Nijinsky behaves so stupidly.7 He didn't even answer my de-

tailed and, in my opinion, fair letter, and to my modest telegram

requesting, "reply paid," whether he had received it, he

answered only: "Letter received. Cannot come."

7 Diaghilev's vengeance had begun. Almost every letter from him for the

next few years contained a complaint about Nijinsky, and when Nijinsky

wrote him from New York, addressing him "tu," he was more offended

than ever.

Myself in 1886.

My mother and father, ca. 1900, in our house in St. Petersburg. My first

knowledge of music was acquired at this piano.

Monte Carlo, in front of the Riviera Palace Hotel, April 16, 1911. Theladies in dark suits are the sisters Botkin, nieces of the Tsar's doctor. Then,

from left to right, standing, are P. Koribut-Koubitovitch (a cousin of

Diaghilev), Karsavina, Nijinsky, myself, Benois, Diaghilev.

left: Myself, Prokofiev, Pierre Souvtschinsky at Talloires (Loc d'Annecy,

1929).

right: Stephen Mitusov, co-librettist with me of the Nightingale, photo-

graphed by me in Warsaw in 1913. I was profoundly influenced by this

man in my St. Petersburg years. An excellent judge of music, painting, andliterature, his musical taste was the most widely informed in St. Petersburg.

We were daily companions throughout my last years in St. Petersburg.

I did not see him again after the day this photograph was taken, but I

received a letter from him in Nice in the 1920s, telling me how much hehad enjoyed my Pribaoutki and other Russian songs; and in 1952 his

sister came backstage to greet me after a concert in Brussels.

Ravel, Nijinsky, Bronislava Nijinska, photographed by me onRavel's balcony, 1913.

s

/] !

My Tsarist passport.

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL 49

I am sure that his wife is busy making him into the first ballet

master of the Budapest Opera. As for Noces, do not worry. I

will write him a second, less modest, and less reasonable letter

and this miserable person will understand that now is not the

moment for joking. The invention of movement in Noces is

definitely for Nijinsky, but I will not discuss the thing with him

for several months yet. As for Massine, he is still too young, but

each day he becomes more and more ours, and this is important.

I am not going into any details now but let me tell you that what

I have in mind is a performance of the mass in six or seven short

tableaux. The epoch will be Byzantine, which Mestrovic will

arrange in his own way. The music should be a series of a

cappella sacred choruses, inspired, perhaps, by Gregorian chant,

but of that later. When you come you will meet a great connois-

seur of these matters—Mestrovic.

The frescoes in the Roman underground churches of the first

century are really astounding.

For the moment, that is all. I hope you approve. The main

thing is that you come. Please answer me immediately to the

Grand Hotel.

I embrace you, Serge

Grand Hotel(we are in the

Grand Hotel until Sth March )

3rd March 1925

Dear, you are a little mad. San Martino buij something? His

wife would choke to death first. They'll never do it. However,

the American Russell was here; he found the price very high,

though he said he would try to do something if you would send

him a manuscript. He has gone to America, and his address is

c/o Metropolitan Opera House, New York, Henry Russell,

Esquire.

I am afraid to send him the manuscript,8 however, because

8 Of The Firebird.


someone could print it in America without paying you a penny.

If you want to, however, do it yourself. I on my side will speak

to Ricordi, although with little hope. As to the material of the

Nightingale, you are not so much mad as ridiculous. If Telia-

tina9 stages it at all he will not do so earlier than 1917, wheneverybody will have forgotten about the war. Why in hell

should Prokofiev (who is coming today) drag the material with

him so that it can stay two years in Petrogrrrrrad.10 Tell me if

we have to fulfill this foolish order.

Now about us. We are going to Naples and Palermo on 8th

March for 10-12 days and afterward coming to you to take Les

Noces. It must be finished by that time. Then, with you, or with-

out you, we are going for about three weeks to Spain. And after-

ward? I don't know what and where, but we will work, and not

twiddle our thumbs as some people do. So, expect us about the

twentieth of March, and have a big ballet ready—without that I

shall be very angry.

Before speaking with Dalcroze we must see what his material

is.11

Everybody greets you. You left an "indelible mark," as they

say here.

Serge D.

P.S. Khvotschinsky leaves for the war, drafted in Russia.

P.P.S. It is as hot as summer here, and the sun beats down full

force.

9 Teliakovsky, director of the Opera in St. Petersburg. Teliatina means

veal.

10 Diaghilev is making fun of the word, as we all did when the "St."

was dropped and the "burg" made "grad."

11 1 don't remember what Dalcroze's project was, but I do rememberhaving been to him and having seen demonstrations of his eurhythmic

gymnastics.

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL 51

Hotel de Paris

Monte Carlo

jth April 10,26

Mon cher Igor,

I read your letter in tears. Not for a single minute have I

ever stopped thinking of you except as a brother. Therefore,

I feel joyful and full of light today because in your thoughts you

have embraced me as one. I remember the letter you wrote

me after the death of your brother Goury. I remember also the

letter I wrote you not long ago telling you that when in

moments of deep disturbance I remember that you are living

almost next door in the world, I start to feel better. To forgive, it

seems to me, is within the power of God alone; only He can

judge. But we other little lecherous people, we ought in our

moments of quarreling or repentance to have enough strength to

embrace each other like brothers and forget. This can evoke the

thirst for forgiveness, and if you have this thirst, turn it toward

me. I do not fast or go to confession or Communion ( I am not a

communicant). However, I ask you to forgive me my sins,

voluntary and involuntary, and to keep in your heart only this

feeling of brotherly love which I feel toward you.

Seriosha

III. SOME RUSSIAN COMPOSERS

RIMSKY-KORSAKOV

R.C. What are your present feelings, personal and other-

wise, toward Riinsky-Korsakov, and do you remember the

Chant Funebre you composed in his memory?

7.S. After fifty years it is quite impossible to discriminate

between memories personal and impersonal; all memories

are personal, yet so far are mine removed from the person

that they cannot be told otherwise than impersonally. Fewpeople can have been as close to Rimsky as I was, espe-

cially after the death of my father, when, for me, he was

like an adopted parent. We try not to judge our parents,

but we judge them, nonetheless, and often unjustly. I hope

I am not unjust to Rimsky.

A great difference in character existed between the

Rimsky of the Autobiography, which is the one most peo-

ple knew, and the Rimsky who was my teacher. Readers

of that well-written but matter-of-fact book think of him

as someone not very easy with his sympathy and not

abundantly generous or kind; moreover, the artist in the

Autobiography was sometimes shockingly shallow in his

artistic aims. My Rimsky was deeply sympathetic, how-

ever, deeply and unshowingly generous, and unkind only

to admirers of Tchaikovsky. The shallow I cannot counter,

for obviously there was nothing profound either in Rim-

sky's nature or in his music.

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL 53

I adored Rimsky but did not like his "mentality," by

which I mean his almost bourgeois atheism (he would

call it his "rationalism" ) . His mind was closed to any

religious or metaphysical idea. If conversation happened

to touch on some point of religion or philosophy he would

simply refuse to allow that point to be considered, in the

light of "revealed religion." I was accustomed to dine with

the Rimsky-Korsakov family after my lessons. We drank

vodka and ate zakousky together, then started the dinner.

I would sit next to Rimsky and often continue to discuss

some problem from my previous lesson. Rimsky's sons and

daughters occupied the rest of the table. His second son,

Andrei, had studied philosophy at Heidelberg, and he

often came to dinner with one Mironov, a university friend.

But in spite of these young people's interest in philosophy,

Rimsky would permit no discussion of it in his presence. I

remember someone introducing "resurrection" as a table

topic and Rimsky drawing a zero on the tablecloth as he

said, "There is nothing after death; death is the end." I

then had the temerity to suggest that perhaps his was also

merely one point of view, but was made to feel for some

time thereafter that I should have held my peace.

I thought I had found friends in Rimsky's younger sons,

two young gentlemen who, at least in provincial St. Peters-

burg, were beacons of enlightenment. Andrei, a man three

years my senior and a cellist of some ability, was especially

kind to me, though this kindness lasted only while his

father was alive; after the success of The Firebird in 1910

he, and in fact the entire Rimsky-Korsakov family, turned

against me. 1 He even reviewed Petroushka for a Russian

newspaper, dismissing it as "Russian vodka with French

I I think this was musical rather than personal. My music was too

"advanced" for them. Glazunov was their darling.


perfumes." Vladimir, his brother, was a competent violinist,

and I owe to him my first knowledge of violin fingerings.

I was not close to Sophie and Nadejda,2 Rimsky's daugh-

ters, though my last contact with the Rimsky-Korsakov

family was through Nadejda's husband, Maximilian Stein-

berg, who had come to Paris in 1924 and heard me play

my piano concerto there. But you may imagine his response

to that work when I tell you that the best he could do even

for my Fireworks was to shrug his shoulders. After hearing

the concerto he wanted to lecture me about the whole of

my mistaken career. He returned to Russia thoroughly

annoyed when I refused to see him.

Rimsky was a tall man, like Berg, or Aldous Huxley,

and, like Huxley, too, he suffered from poor eyesight. Hewore blue-tinted spectacles, sometimes keeping an extra

pair on his forehead, a habit of his I have caught. Whenconducting an orchestra he would bend over the score,

and, hardly ever looking up, wave the baton in the direc-

tion of his knees. His difficulty in seeing the score was so

great, and he was so absorbed in listening, that he gave

almost no directions to the orchestra at all. Like Berg, he

suffered from asthma. In the last year of his life he began

to fail very suddenly from the effects of this disease, and

though he was only sixty-four years old we were aware

that he would not last very long. He had a series of severe

attacks in January, 1908. Telephone calls came every

morning from his house to ours, and I waited every morn-

ing, not knowing whether he was still alive.

Rimsky was a strict man and a strict, though at the same

time very patient, teacher (he would say, "ponimyete,

ponimyete" "you understand/' again and again through-

2 My Pastorale was written with Nadejda's voice in mind, and dedicated

to her. I later arranged this piece for violin and four woodwinds, for the

simple reason that songs as such were no longer performed.

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL 55

out my lessons ) . His knowledge was precise, and he was

able to impart whatever he knew with great clarity. His

teaching was all "technical." But, whereas he knew valua-

ble details about harmony and practical orchestral writing,

what he knew about composition itself was not all it should

have been. He was for me, when I first came to him, sans

reproche musically, but before very long I began to wish

for someone even less "reproachable" and for music that

would satisfy the ideals of my growing mind as Rimsky's

was failing to do. The revival of polyphony and the re-

newal of form that had begun in Vienna in the very year

of Rimsky's death were developments entirely unknown

to the Rimsky school. I am grateful to Rimsky for many

things, and I do not wish to blame him for what he did

not know; nevertheless, the most important tools of myart I had to discover for myself. I should mention, too,

that by the time I had become his pupil he was a reaction-

ary who would oppose on principle anything new that

came from France or Germany. I never ceased to be

surprised by this attitude, since outside the arts he was

a radical, anti-Tsarist progressive.

Though Rimsky had wit and a lively sense of humor,

though he had developed a literary style of his own, his

literary taste was parochial, and in the worst sense. The

librettos of his operas, except that of The Snow Maiden

(Ostrovsky) and Mozart and Salieri (Pushkin), are, on

the whole, embarrassingly bad. I once drew his attention

to an anachronism in one of them: "But, dear master, do

you really think such an expression was in use in the

fifteenth century?" "It is in use now and that is all weneed concern ourselves with." Rimsky could not conceive

of Tchaikovsky otherwise than as a "rival." Tchaikovsky

had been more influential in Germany than Rimsky, and

Rimsky was jealous ( it seems to me that Tchaikovsky had


a distinct influence on Mahler; listen to Figs. 16 to 21 in

the fourth movement of Mahler's First Symphony, and

from Fig. 21 in the fifth movement of the Second Sym-

phony). He would say, and never tire of saying, "Tchai-

kovsky's music is in abominable taste," and indeed, though

much of it is, Rimsky might have realized that his ownmusic could share honors with Tchaikovsky's on this

count. Nevertheless, Rimsky was proud to exhibit in his

workroom a large silver crown Tchaikovsky had given him

for the premiere of the Capriccio Espagnol. Tchaikovsky

had attended the dress rehearsal and had so admired the

brilliance of the music that he presented Rimsky with this

token of homage the next day.

Rimsky was an Anglophile. He had learned English

during his term as a naval officer, and though I cannot say

how well he spoke it, I first heard the language from his

lips. He often expressed himself in little English asides.

Thus, one day a young composer had come to show him a

score, but in his nervous excitement lost it in a droshky.

Rimsky groaned disappointment in Russian, but whis-

pered to me in English, "The heavens are merciful."

Rimsky did not mention me in his autobiography for

the reason that he did not wish to show me any mark of

deference; he had many pupils and was always careful to

avoid favoritism. My brother Goury is mentioned, because

he had sung in a cantata which I composed for Rimsky

and which was performed in his house. After this event

Rimsky wrote my mother a charming letter in apprecia-

tion of our talents.

Rimsky attended my first two premieres with me. The

first of these pieces, the Symphony in E Flat, is dedicated

to him ( the manuscript is still with his family ) . It was per-

formed in St. Petersburg on April 27, 1907; I remember the

date because my Uncle Ielachitch presented me with a

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL 57

medal commemorating it. Rimsky sat next to me and, from

time to time, made critical remarks: "This is too heavy;

be more careful when you use trombones in their middle

register/' etc. As the concert took place at noon, and as the

audience was not a paying one, I cannot say whether the

applause I heard signified a success. The only bad omen

was Glazunov, who came to me afterward, saying, "Very

nice, very nice." The Imperial Kapellmeister, Varlich, a

general in uniform, conducted the performance. Mysecond premiere, the Faune et Bergdre, conducted by Felix

Blumenfeld later the same year in one of Belayev's

"Russian Symphony Concerts," must have irritated Rim-

sky's conservatism, however, incredible though that may

seem now. He found the first song "strange," and my use

of whole-tone progressions suspiciously "Debussy-ist."

"There, you see," he said to me after the performance, "I

have heard it, but if I were to hear it again in a half hour I

would have to make the same effort of adjustment all over."

At this time, Rimsky's own "modernism" was based on a

few flimsy enharmonic devices.

The Chant Fundbre for wind instruments that I com-

posed in Rimsky*s memory was performed in a concert

conducted by Blumenfeld in St. Petersburg shortly after

Rimsky's death. I remember the piece as the best of myworks before The Firebird, and the most advanced in

chromatic harmony. The orchestral parts must have been

preserved in one of the St. Petersburg orchestra libraries;

I wish someone in Leningrad would look for the parts, for

I would be curious myself to see what I was composing

just before The Firebird. Alas, the only homage I have

paid Rimsky since then was my conducting of his tone

poem Sadko3 (not the opera; the tone poem is a more

8 In New York, in 1935.


interesting work than the opera ) , the one work of his which

I thought worth resurrecting.

I no longer possess any of Rimsky's letters to me, though

I must have had fifty or more in Oustiloug. I regret this

very much, as he had sent me many delightful cards from

Lago di Garda, where he spent his summers. I have no

manuscript either, though he gave me the first fifty pages

of his Snow Maiden score. In fact, I have no autograph

of his at all—which information is for the benefit of the

person who regularly sends me registered letters from

somewhere in Brazil begging for an autograph of Rimsky's.

CESAR CUI

R.C. Did you know Cesar Cui in your Rimsky-Korsakov

years?

Z.S. I must have known him very early in my life, for he

was a great admirer of my father's and probably a guest

at our home. My father had sung in some of Cufs operas,

and I remember being sent to Cui in 1901 with a special

invitation to an opera performance celebrating my father's

jubilee—my father's wish to pay Cui a mark of attention.

But though I saw Cui frequently at concerts I do not re-

member him dressed otherwise than in a military uniform

—trousers with a stripe on the side, and a tunic which on

special occasions had a little balcony of medals. Cui

continued to lecture at the Military Institute in St. Peters-

burg until the end of his life. He was said to be an

authority on fortifications. Indeed, I suspect he knew more

about them than about counterpoint, and the impression

in my mind of Cui as a kind of Clausewitz is as strong

as the impression of the musician. He was stiff and military

personally, too, and one felt half inclined to stand at

attention when talking to him. He could be seen at con-

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL 59

certs and other musical functions in St. Petersburg almost

regularly, in spite of his age, and the musicians of mygeneration came to stare at him as at a great curiosity.

Cui was rabidly anti-Wagner, but he had little to ad-

vance in Wagner's stead—a case of "more substance in our

enmities than in our love."

Nor could I take his orientalism seriously. "Russian

music," or "Hungarian" or "Spanish," or any other of the

national nineteenth-century kind is, all of it, as thin as local

color, and as boring. Cui did help me to discover Dargo-

mizhsky, however, and for that I am grateful. Russalka was

the popular Dargomizhsky opera at the time, but Cui con-

sidered The Stone Guest the better work. His writings drew

my attention to the remarkable quality of the recitatives in

the latter, and though I do not know what I would think

of this music now, it has had an influence on my subsequent

operatic thinking.

I do not know whether Cui had heard my Firebird, and

though I think he was present at the first performances

of the Scherzo Fantastique and Fireworks, I recall no hint

of his reactions to these pieces' reaching my ears.

ANTON ARENSKY

R.C. And Anton Arensky?

I.S. Arensky was a composer of the Moscow school—in

other words, a follower of Tchaikovsky. I—as a pupil of

Rimsky-Korsakov, and for that very reason—could not

know him well. And, in all that concerned Arensky, Rimsky

was, I thought, unjustifiably harsh and unkind. He criti-

cized Arensky's music captiously and unnecessarily, and

a comment about it, which he allowed to be printed after

Arensky's death, was cruel: "Arensky did very little, and

that little will be forgotten soon." I attended a performance

of Arensky's opera Dream on the Volga with Rimsky. The


music was dull indeed, and Arensky's attempt to evoke

sinister atmosphere with the bass clarinet was horse-opera

farce. But Rimsky's exclamation to me that "the noble bass

clarinet should not be put to such ignominious use" must

have been overheard several rows in front of us, and later,

of course, throughout the theater.

Arensky had been friendly, interested, and helpful to

me, however, and in spite of Rimsky, I always liked him

and at least one of his works—the famous piano trio. Hemeant something to me also by the mere fact of his being

a direct personal link with Tchaikovsky.

SERGE TANEYEV

R.C. And Serge Taneyev?

I.S. I saw Taneyev from time to time—as often, that is, as

he came to St. Petersburg; for he too was a Muscovite.

He was a Tchaikovsky disciple also, and he sometimes

took Tchaikovsky's classes for him at the Moscow Con-

servatory. Taneyev was a good teacher, and his treatise

on counterpoint—one of the best books of its kind—was

highly valued by me in my youth. I could respect Taneyev

as a composer, especially for certain passages in his opera

The Oresteia, and I admired him greatly as a pianist. But

the same hostility prevailed on the Rimsky-Korsakov side,

and poor Taneyev was very unjustly treated in St. Peters-

burg. I might add that Taneyev was held in some awe

by us for an extra-musical reason: he was widely acknowl-

edged to be the best friend of the Countess Tolstoy.

ANATOL LIADOV

R.C. What were your relations with Anatol Liadov—

especially after you had accepted the Firebird commis-

sion he had failed to fulfill?

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL 6l

I.S. Liadov was a darling man, as sweet and charming as

his own Musical Snuff Box. We called him "the black-

smith," but I can't think why, unless it was because he was

so soft and gentle and so very unlike a blacksmith. He was

a small man with a sympathetic, squinting face and few

hairs on his head. He always carried books under his arm-Maeterlinck, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Andersen: he liked

tender, fantastical things. He was a short-winded, pianis-

simo composer and he never could have written a long and

noisy ballet like The Firebird. He was more relieved than

offended, I suspect, when I accepted the commission.

I liked Liadov's music, especially the piano pieces

Kikimora and the Baba Yaga. He had a good harmonic

sense, and he always presented his music well instru-

mentally. Perhaps I was even somehow aware of the

Musical Snuff Box when I composed a similar piece of myown, the "ice-cream" wagon Valse in my second suite for

small orchestra. I often accompanied Liadov to concerts,

but if we were not together and he happened to see mein the hall he would always invite me to come and follow a

score with him. I do not know if he had heard The Firebird

in later years, but I am sure he would have defended it

if he had. He was the most progressive of the musicians

of his generation and he had championed my first pieces.

Early in Scriabin's career, when the large public's resist-

ance to that composer was still general, someone referred

to Scriabin in Liadov's ( and my) presence as a fool, where-

upon Liadov said, "I like such fools."

When I think of Liadov I remember another composer,

and since it will not occur to you to question me about

him, I will mention him myself. Joseph Wihtol, composer

and teacher—he had collaborated with Rimsky-Korsakov

in one or two works and was a colleague of Liadov's in

that horrible musical prison, the St. Petersburg Conserva-


tory—was kindly, like Liadov, and very helpful to me. Hewas a jovial man, with round face and round hands like a

cat's paws. He later lived in Riga, and when I visited that

city on a concert in 1934 his affection and hospitality

to me were princely.

SCRIABIN

R.C. What were your associations with Scriabin, both in

St. Petersburg and later, when Diaghilev had become

interested in him? Did he have any influence on you?

I.S. I do not remember my first meeting with Scriabin, but

it must have been in Rimsky-Korsakov's house, for we often

encountered each other there in the years of my tutelage

with Rimsky. But he was personally so maladroit, and his

way of treating me and Rimsky's other pupils von oben

nach unten was so detestable, that I never wished to

cultivate his company. Rimsky disliked him too; in fact,

whenever he mentioned Scriabin to me he referred to him

as "the narcissus." Rimsky did not value Scriabin's gifts

as a composer very highly either: "Mais, c'est du Rubin-

stein" ("Anton Rubinstein" being at this time a term of

abuse about the equivalent of "merde").

As a pupil of Taneyev, Scriabin was better grounded

in counterpoint and harmony than most of the Russians-

very much better equipped in these respects than, say,

Prokofiev, whose gifts were perhaps more brilliant. His

own ground was derived in part from Liszt, which was

natural for the age. I had nothing against Liszt, but I did

not like Scriabin's way of continually arguing a Chopin-

Liszt line as against a German tradition. I have elsewhere

described his shock when I expressed my admiration for

Schubert. The marvelous Schubert F-Minor Fantasia for

piano four hands was for Scriabin "la musique pour les

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL 63

jeunes demoiselles." But most of his musical opinions were

no better than that. I last saw him in Ouchy shortly before

his death: his father was Russian Consul in Lausanne, and

I had gone to Lausanne to have my passport signed. Alex-

ander Nicolaevitch had just arrived there. He talked to

me about Debussy and Ravel, and about my own music.

He had no insight at all: "I can show you how to maketheir kind of French grimace. Take a figure of open fifths,

relieve it with augmented 6—4—3 chords, add a tower of

thirds until you have dissonance enough, then repeat the

whole thing in another Tcey': you will be able to compose

as much 'Debussy' and 'Ravel' as you wish/' He did not

tell me all that he told others about my own music—

namely, that he too was horrified by he Sacre; but as he

had not been able to follow either Petroushka or The Fire-

bird, it was my fault to have been surprised.

Scriabin's vogue in St. Petersburg began about 1905. I

attributed it more to his phenomenal abilities as a pianist

than to whatever new qualities there were in his music, but

no matter the reasons, there was a sudden and very con-

siderable interest in him, and he was hailed, at least in

avant-garde circles, as an "original."

To answer your questions, perhaps I have been influ-

enced by Scriabin in one very insignificant respect, in the

piano writing of my Etudes, op. 7. But one is influenced

by what one loves, and I never could love a bar of his

bombastic music. As for Scriabin's short career with

Diaghilev, I know only why it was short: Scriabin was

"morbid." Diaghilev had mistakenly assumed the contrary,

and had decided to take him to Paris, telling me, "I will

show Scriabin's music to Paris." The show, whatever it was,

did not succeed.

Scriabin was literary-minded. Villiers de Lisle-Adam,

Huysmans, the whole company of the "decadents" were


his rages. It was the age of Symbolism, and in Russia he

and Konstantin Balmont were its gods. He was a follower

of Mme. Blavatsky, too, and a serious and well-considered

theosophist himself. I did not understand this, for in mygeneration Mme. Blavatsky was already very demode,

but I respected his beliefs. Scriabin was an arrogant-

looking man with thick blond hair and a blonde barbiche.

Although his death was tragic and premature, I have some-

times wondered at the kind of music such a man would

have written had he survived into the 1920s.

SERGE PROKOFIEV

R.C. What are your personal memories of Prokofiev, and

what did you think of each other's music?

I.S. I met Prokofiev in St. Petersburg in the winter of

1906-7. He was only seventeen or eighteen at the time, but

he had been given part of a concert in Walter Nouvel's

"Evenings of Contemporary Music" series in which to play

a group of his piano pieces. His performance was remarka-

ble—but I have always liked his music, hearing him play it

—and the music had personality. I do not know if Rimsky

was there, though I do remember from a conversation with

him about Prokofiev that he regarded him very skeptically.

But it was Liadov, not Rimsky-Korsakov, who had been

Prokofiev's protector.

I did not know Prokofiev well until several years later, in

Milan, during the war. Diaghilev was busy introducing

him to the Futurists and to 'leftist" circles in general.

Diaghilev wanted him to mix, to exchange ideas with other

artists, but the attempt failed, as it always did thereafter,

because Prokofiev was "full of splinters," as he says about

his music in a letter to me, with people who were more

cultivated than he was—and a good many were that. On

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL 65

this Milanese visit Le Sacre du Printemps was his only

subject of conversation. He adored Le Sacre and was for

many years quite unable to recover from the effect of it.

Prokofiev was the contrary of a musical thinker. He was,

in fact, startlingly naive in matters of musical construc-

tion. He had some technique and he could do certain

things very well, but, more than that, he had personality;

one saw that in his every gesture—biological personality,

let us call it. His musical judgments were usually common-

place, however, and often wrong. An example of the latter

comes to mind in relation to Petroushka. He was once

seated beside me at a performance of that work when, in

the Fourth Tableau, at the climax of the Russian Dances,

he turned to me and said, "You should have ended here."

But it is obvious to any perceptive musician that the best

pages in Petroushka are the last.

Prokofiev was always very Russian-minded and always

primitively anticlerical. But in my opinion these disposi-

tions had little to do with his return to Russia. The latter

was a sacrifice to the bitch goddess, and nothing else. Hehad had no success in the United States or Europe for

several seasons, while his visit to Russia had been a tri-

umph. When I saw him for the last time, in New York in

1937, he was despondent about his material and artistic

fate in France. He was politically naive, however, and

had learned nothing from the example of his good friend

Miakovsky. He returned to Russia, and when finally he

understood his situation there, it was too late. A few weeks

before his death a friend of mine in Paris received a letter

from him inquiring about me, and this touched me very

much.

I do not know what he liked of my music beyond the

Russian pieces, and especially Le Sacre, Renard, Noces,


but I doubt if he knew very much of what I had written

in the 1930s, and I am quite sure he would not have liked

it if he did. The fact that we were not really in accord

musically did not seem to matter. We were always on very

good terms; there was never any incident between us; and

I believe he liked me as much as he did any musical friend.

But one could see Prokofiev a thousand times without es-

tabhshing any profound connection with him, and werarely discussed music when we were together. I used to

think that Prokofiev's depths were engaged only when he

played chess. He was a master player, and he played with

all the celebrities, as well as with my wife Vera.

Diaghilev had believed at first that Prokofiev would

develop into a great composer, and he held to this belief

for several years. Then, finally, he confided to me that he

was beginning to think him "stupid." I have a letter from

Diaghilev about Prokofiev.

Grand Hotel, Rome8th March iqi$

Dear Igor, Many new questions, but first of all Prokofiev. Yester-

day he played in the Augusteum, and with some success, but

that is not the point. The point is, he brought me about one

third of the music of his new ballet. The subject is a St. Peters-

burg fabrication; it would have been good for the Mariinsky

Theater ten years ago, but is not for us. The music, as he says,

does not look for Russianism, it is just music. Precisely, just

music, and very bad. Now we have to start all over again, and

for this we have to be kindly with him and keep him with us for

two or three months. I am counting on your help. He is talented,

but what do you expect when the most cultivated person he sees

is Tcherepnine, who impresses him with his avant-gardisme

( 1) . He is easily influenced and it seems to me he is a much

nicer person than we suspected he would be after his arrogant

appearance in the past. I will bring him to you. He must bechanged entirely, otherwise we will lose him forever. . . .

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL 67

Of Prokofiev's Diaghilev ballets I preferred Chout,

though the L'Enfant Prodigue by Balanchine was the

most beautiful choreographically. But I do not wish to

criticize Prokofiev: I should be silent if I could say nothing

good about such a man. Prokofiev had merits, and that

rare thing, the instant imprint of personality. Nor was he

cheap—facility is not the same thing as cheapness. Only,

alas, he would not have understood Mallarme's reply to a

man who had congratulated him upon making such a

clear speech: "Then I will have to add some shadows."

Prokofiev's letters to me were very affectionate. It is hard

to reproduce their tone in English, but I think this example

gives some idea of the character of his correspondence:

c/o Haensel and Jones,

33 West 42nd St., New York

10th December iqiq

Dear Stravinsky,

I tell you the following with pleasure. Yesterday your

Pribaoutki were performed for the first time in America. Vera

Janacopoulos sang, a very talented singer.4 Her approach to

them was most loving, and she sang them beautifully, except

perhaps for Uncle Armand, which is too low for her voice. Thesuccess was very great and all four songs were repeated. Lots of

people in the audience laughed, but gaily, not indignantly. I sat

next to Fokine and we bawled "bravos" as loud as we could. Theinstrumentalists played well, and performed their tasks with

interest. Only the viola and the bass may have been angry about

it. The flautist, who had already played the Japanese Lyrics, was

so sure of himself, no difficulties could frighten him. I went to

the rehearsals and tried to explain what was not clear to them.

Personally I like most: 1. Uncle Armand. The oboe and clarinet

are like the gurgle of a bottle emptying. You express drunken-

ness through your clarinet with the skill of a real drunkard; 2.

The whole Natashka, but especially the last five bars with the

delightful grumbling of the winds; 3. The Colonel, entirely, but

4 I knew her well.


especially the oboe twitters and the climax on the words "pala

propala" etc.; 4. Many things in the last song, but the coda

above all: the clarinet's G-A-natural and the English horn's A-

flat are most excellent and most insolent.

1 send you my cordial greetings and best wishes. I shall be

very happy to hear from you,

Yours, S. Prokofiev

Portraits Mcmoircs

PAUL VALfiRY

R.C. Your long friendship and admiration for Paul Val6ry

are well known. Would you tell me what you remember of

him and also what you now think of his work?

LS. I met Paul Valery for the first time in 1921 or 1922:

while only half recalling the date and the occasion (a

reception by the Princess Edmond de Polignac, I think),

I do remember the meeting. Valery was small, about myown height, in fact, which for some reason surprised me.

He was quick, quiet (he spoke in rapid, sotto voce

mumbles), and extremely gentle. He seemed a terrible

dandy at first sight because of his monocle and bouton-

niere, but that impression dissolved as soon as he began

to talk. Wit and intelligence were in everything he said,

though not merely in what he said: they were manifest

in his whole person. This was to be expected of Valery, of

course; what I did not expect, however, but was delighted

to discover in him that first day, was a truly joyful sense of

humor. By the time of parting we had already attained a

high state of personal sympathy, and we were ever after

natural friends.

Now that I have begun to force my memory about Va-

lery, I wonder I did not know him earlier. I had read

Monsieur Teste before the 1914 war. I remember that I

mentioned the book to Gide and that Gide responded


with an encomium about its author. Ravel had also talked

to me about Valery in those years, and C. F. Ramuz too,

though somewhat later, in Switzerland during the war.

And we had many mutual friends (Misia Sert, for ex-

ample) at whose homes we ought to have encountered

each other. But whatever kept us apart, we never failed

to make up the gaps, and in the later 1920s and in the 30s

up to my departure for America, we saw each other so

regularly that we might be thought to have formed a

"circle." When I left Europe in September, 1939, to give

the Norton Lectures at Harvard, I counted Valery of all

my friends the one whose wisdom I would most sorely miss.

Valery was a deep source of intellectual and moral sup-

port to me on two important occasions in my life. One of

these concerned the Harvard lectures, "The Poetics of

Music," as I call them. I had asked him to read and criti-

cize my manuscript. I was anxious to have his comments

on its literary style, especially since I had written the lec-

tures not in my own language but in French; I was not

quite confident about some of the "writing." Accordingly,

I read my manuscript to him in a country house near Paris,

sometime in the late summer of 1939. He suggested various

changes in the phrasing and order of words, but to mygreat relief endorsed the style of the lectures without res-

ervation.

My other "professional" call on him came at the time

of the first performance of my, and Andre Gide's, Per-

sephone. From my conversations with him I felt he had

understood my views on the tedious subject, "music and

words." Not that these views were difficult or obscure, or

even original; Beethoven had already expressed them, in

sum, in a letter to his publisher: "Music and words are

one and the same thing." Words combined with music lose

some of the rhythmic and sonorous relationships that ob-

PORTRAITS MEMOIRES J\

tained when they were words only; or, rather, they ex-

change these relationships for new ones—for, in fact, a new

"music." They no doubt mean the same things; but they

are magical as well as meaningful, and their magic is trans-

formed when they are combined with music; I do not say

that a composer may not try to preserve or imitate effects

of purely verbal relationships in music. I have done pre-

cisely that myself, in instances where the verse form is

strict or where the meter of the verse has suggested a musi-

cal construction to me ( in the sonnet Musick to Heare, for

instance ) . But this approach implies something of what is

meant by the phrase "setting words to music," a limited,

pejorative description that is certainly as far from Beetho-

ven's meaning as it is from mine.

Gide understood little or nothing of all this, however;

or, if he understood, disagreed. (That Gide understood

nothing whatever about music in general is apparent to

anyone who has read his Notes on Chopin.) He had ex-

pected the Persephone text to be sung with exactly the

same stresses he would use to recite it. He believed mymusical purpose should be to imitate or underline the ver-

bal pattern: I would simply have to find pitches for the

syllables, since he considered he had already composed

the rhythm. The tradition of poesia per musica meant noth-

ing to him. And, not understanding that a poet and a mu-

sician collaborate to produce one music, he was only hor-

rified by the discrepancies between my music and his.

I turned to Valery for support, and no arbiter could have

given me more. I do not know what he said to Gide. But

to me he affirmed the musician's prerogative to treat loose

and formless prosodies (such as Gide's) according to his

musical ideas, even if the latter led to "distortion" of phras-

ing or to breaking up, for purposes of syllabification, of the

words themselves. (But what kind of music did Gide ex-

J2, MEMORIES AND COMMENTARIES

pect of me? ) And when Persephone was finally performed,

at the end of April, 1934, Valery continued conspicuously

to support me by attending all the performances, a fact I

much appreciated—especially since his Semiramis, pro-

duced for the first time only a week after Persephone, must

have occupied a good deal of his time.

Shortly before the Persephone premiere I composed a

statement of my views on the relations of text and music

and on the musical syllabification of a text. This manifesto,

as it was published in the Paris Excelsior, concluded with

the words: "... a nose is not manufactured: a nose just

is, thus, too, my art." After the premiere I received the fol-

lowing letter from Valery:

The French Academy2nd May 1934

My dear Stravinsky, I could not get to you Monday evening to

tell you of the extraordinary impression the Persephone music

made on me. I am only a "profane" listener, but the divine de-

tachment of your work touched me. It seems to me that what I

have sometimes searched for in the ways of poetry you pursue

and join in your art. The point is, to attain purity through the

will. You expressed it marvelously well in the article yesterday,

which I immensely enjoyed, long live your nose.

Sincerely yours, Paul Valery

Valery knew little enough about music. But he knew

that he knew little and therefore did not utter banalities

of the type one so often hears from literary people. Hemade a point of attending performances of my works, and

this touched me. I have a distinct recollection of him at

the first presentation of my Dumbarton Oaks Concerto in

Paris; my painter son Theodore made a drawing of him at

the time as a present for me.

The Valery who most interests me at present is one whose

very existence most critics would deny: the religious.

PORTRAITS MEMOIRES 73

Valery's nature was in some way religious, no matter how

essentially non-religious his writings. Like Shaw, he had

been the friend of a nun—of several nuns, in fact—and he

had had doctrinal discussions with them. He was not sus-

ceptible to any religious orthodoxy, of course, nor, I think,

was he even potentially a believer. When he had discov-

ered the fallacy in the argument that the existence of ab-

solute moral values must presuppose a Superior Being,

when he saw that "absolute" and "Superior" represented

an analytic contradiction, he did not look further, and in-

stead of Valery the theist we have Valery the moralist.

Nevertheless, he had thoughts that I would call religious,

and these thoughts are revealed in the plays, especially

in My Faust. If Waiting for Godot is religious, then so,

certainly, is The Only One. And the Devil in Luste whosays, "I fell, but I fell from the top," is the Devil of the

Scriptures and no mere personified idea. Valery is even

able to make this Devil invoke God, as when Mephisto

says, "No one has ever talked to me like this before. At

least . . . not for a long time." And Valery's finest line de-

scribing him, "I am all the peril that is needed to make a

Saint," is not the line of a pure moralist; nor is Faust's

description of him, "The Other," as "Anything one likes,

whatever one likes may be he"; and Mephisto's own: "I

don't know how to think and IVe got no heart ... all I

know is my job." Neither did Valery in conversation with

me display the skeptical temperament for which he was so

famous, though in the religious-literary atmosphere of be-

tween-the-wars Paris, with, on the one hand, Gide and his

Protestant manias, and, on the other, Claudel and his

Wagnerian-Catholic ones, I would have welcomed it.

Valery is not one of the great innovators of our age, as

Joyce was, for example, or Webern, or Klee. He had been

altogether too fascinated by the processes of creation. And


he too much worshiped intellect—indeed, to the point of

valuing himself more as an intellectual than as a poet. The

result of this Teste-ism was his contentment with epista-

menos, with "knowing how/' at which point he would stop.

Valery's philosophical arguments are more rhetorical than

philosophical, in my opinion, even when he is dealing with

a pure philosophy such as Descartes's. I am even tempted

to assert that Valery's having written so much about po-

etry is responsible for dissipating his writing of poetry—

though the examples of other poets contradict such an as-

sertion.

I have never seen a Valery play. I am therefore inclined

to regard them all as collections of dialogues to be read.

(The didactic dialogue on mind in The Only One is cer-

tainly "to be read/' And, reading them, I somehow con-

tinue to hear all the characters speaking in Valery's voice.

I read, and heard, My Faust this way in the last spring of

the war, not suspecting, of course, that I would never again

hear Valery's living voice. Very soon after came the news

of his death. I grieved for him. His loss was a personal one.

ROMAIN ROLLANDR.C. How did you come to know Romain Rolland?

IS. At the beginning of the 1914 war, before the scandal

of his Au Dessus de la Melee, he wrote asking me to con-

tribute a statement to a book he was then preparing—an

indictment of German "barbarism." I replied as follows:

Mon cher confrirel I hasten to answer your appeal for a protest

against the barbarism of the German armies. But is ''barbarism"

the right word? What is a barbarian? It seems to me that by defi-

nition he is someone belonging to a new or different concep-

tion of culture than our own; and though this culture might be

radically different or antithetical to ours we do not for that rea-

son deny its value, or the possibility that this value might be

greater than our own.


But the present Germany cannot be considered as a manifes-

tation of "new culture/' Germany, as a country , belongs to the

old world, and the culture of the country is as old as that of the

other nations of Western Europe. However, a nation which in

time of peace erects a series of monuments such as those of the

Siegesallee in Berlin and which, in time of war, sends her armies

to destroy a city like Louvain and a cathedral like Rheims is not

barbarian in the proper sense nor civilized in any sense. If

"renewal" is what Germany really seeks, she might better start

at home with her Berlin monuments. It is the highest commoninterest of all those peoples who still feel the need to breathe the

air of their ancient culture to put themselves on the side of the

enemies of the present Germany, and to flee forever the unbear-

able spirit of this colossal, obese, and morally putrefying

Germania.

Igor Stravinsky

P.S. Throughout these terrible days—to which we are the living

witnesses—your appeal "L'union fait la force" has been our one

encouragement

Shortly after sending him this letter I made his acquaint-

ance on, of all places, a "lac des quatre Cantons'* excursion

boat. I was with my wife and children, enjoying a day's

outing, when a tall, spectacled gentleman, evidently doing

the same thing, came up to me and shyly introduced him-

self as my correspondent. I was immediately taken by his

personal charm and intellectual honesty, and though his

literature—Jean Christophe and Beethoven the Creator-

were and are exactly what I most abhor, these books have

not obstructed my feeling for the man. 1I saw him oc-

casionally after that in company with Claudel and Jules

Romains, if I remember well, at Ramuz's home near Lau-

1 Since writing this, I have come upon a remark of Rilke's about

Rolland which coincides with my own feelings. Rilke found Rolland a"sympathique personality" (letter of March 21, 1913 to M. von Thum undTaxis), but Jean Christophe was "indescribably thin, and the scene has

been righdy placed in Germany because of the length and the sentimen-

tality" (letter to the same of October 4, 1913)—a remark which, by the

way, is almost the only attempt at humor I know of in Rilke.


sanne. Later, he composed an enthusiastic article about

Petroushka after hearing it at a concert in Geneva. I wrote

to thank him for this criticism and we became friends.

MANUEL DE FALLA

R.C. What do you remember of Manuel de Falla?

I.S. Sometime in 1910, at Cipa Godebski's, I was intro-

duced to a man even smaller than myself, and as modest

and withdrawn as an oyster. I took him, Manuel de Falla,

for an homme serieux; in fact, his nature was the most un-

pityingly religious I have ever known—and the least sensi-

ble to manifestations of humor. I have never seen anyone

as shy. In the course of a party in his honor following a

performance of El Retablo de Maese Pedro at the home of

the Princess de Polignac (that curious American womanwho looked like Dante and whose ambition was to have her

bust next to Richelieu's in the Louvre), it was suddenly

noticed that Falla himself had disappeared; he was found

sitting alone in the darkened room of the theater, holding

one of Maese Pedro's puppets. I was always surprised that

a man as shy as Falla could bring himself to appear on

a stage at all. He did conduct, however, and play the

harpsichord—in his concerto, a piece I admire and have

conducted myself. In fact, the last time I saw Falla was at

a performance of this concerto in London in the 1930s.

Falla was always very attentive to me and my work.

When, after the premiere of his Tricorne, I told him that

the best music in his score was not necessarily the most

"Spanish," I knew my remark would impress him. And he

did grow, though his material was so small he could not

grow very far. I thought of him as the most devoted of all

my musical friends. Whereas, for instance, Ravel turned

his back on me after Maura—indeed, the only later work

of mine he ever noticed at all was the Symphony of Psalms


—Falla followed me in all my later music. His ear was very

fine, and I think his appreciation was genuine.

REYNALDO HAHN

R.C. Do you have any recollection of Reynaldo Hahn?

I.S. I saw him quite often at one time, but always in

company with Marcel Proust. Diaghilev needed him and

therefore staged his Dieu Bleu; he was the salon idol of

Paris, and salon support was very useful to Diaghilev at

that time. After the war, however, Diaghilev dropped him

for the very reason that he had once found him important

—his salon reputation. Hahn was an enthusiast of he Sacre

du Printemps, as indeed almost everyone in Paris had

become—except for Debussy, who persisted in calling it

"une musique ndgre" and the few conservatives, who were

calling it "Massacre du Printemps"—and he remained a

partisan of my music up to Pulcinella, which, however,

promptly turned him into an enemy. He was a thin, elegant

man with motherly manners. Here is a New Year's note

from him:

Paris, ist January 1Q14

My dear friend, I thank you sincerely for your telegram, and I

wish for this year the continuing development of your youngglory. I enclose an article of mine that mentions your fascinating

personality. You have had in me an admirer "from the first

hour." But, do not think me a flatterer: I am too pedantic and, I

dare say, too meticulous in my feelings to burst without restraint

as some do, or to resign myself hypocritically as some others do.

I avow my admirations and my true preferences, and I honor

whoever is to be honored. I admire you and esteem you very

highly: you are a great musician.

As for my music, I beg of you to think as little good of it as youwish, but believe in my feelings of sincere friendship and pro-

found artistic sympathy.

Reynaldo Hahn

?8 MEMORIES AND COMMENTARIES

GORODETSKY AND BALMONT

R.C. What do you recollect of the authors of your first

song texts, Sergei Gorodetsky and Konstantin Balmont?

I.S. I knew Gorodetsky well in 1906-7 when I was com-

posing the music to his songs. We did not "collaborate"

on them, however, and after hearing them at a concert

in St. Petersburg, he confided to me that "the music is very

pretty, but it really does not interpret my texts accurately,

since I describe a time-to-time ringing of long, slow bells,

and your music is a kind of jingle bells/' He was a tall,

blond, sickle-nosed man who was later a good friend to

my wife Vera in Tiflis during the Revolution.

I did not meet Balmont, though I saw him at one of

our concerts in St. Petersburg: he had bright red hair and

goatee, and he was dead drunk, which was his normal

condition from the day of his birth to his death. But I was

never close to any Russian literary group, and in fact the

only Russian literary intellectuals I ever did know—Merezhkovsky, for instance, and Prince Mirsky—I had met

in Paris. Balmont lived in Paris, but I did not encounter

him there. His poetry is more significant than Gorodetsky's,

and slightly less faded, though as a nature poet he was

easily overshadowed by the Revolutionaries, and espe-

cially by Alexander Blok. His Zvezdoliki (The Star-Faced

One ) is obscure as poetry and as mysticism, but its words

are good, and words were what I needed, not meanings.

I couldn't tell you even now exactly what the poem means.

LORD BERNERS

R.C. What are your recollections of Lord Berners?

I.S. I met Gerald Tyrwhitt—he was not yet Lord Berners

—in Rome in 1911. He had introduced himself to me as a


friend of my St. Petersburg friend Klukovsky. I found him

droll and delightful. I saw him often after that and on

every trip to Rome during the 1914 war. His remarks about

music were perceptive; and though I considered him an

amateur, but in the best—literal—sense, I would not call

him amateurish, as we now use the word. When we knew

each other better, he began to come to me for criticism

and advice in his composition. I have often looked through

his scores with him at the piano, or listened to them to-

gether with him in the theater, and I thought his Wedding

Bouquet and his Neptune as good as the French works of

that kind produced by Diaghilev, though whether or not

this could be construed as a compliment I cannot say.

I have already told how Lord Berners aided me when,

on my way from Rome to Switzerland in 1917, I was de-

tained by Italian border police and accused of trying to

smuggle a plan of fortifications—in fact, my portrait by

Picasso—out of the country. I suddenly thought of Lord

Berners because of some Mandorlati figs he had given meto eat on the train; a policeman had confiscated the figs

and had begun to split them open with his saber, in search

of I know not what contraband. I telegraphed Berners at

the British Embassy, and had the portrait sent to him to be

forwarded to me in Switzerland as an official paper.

After the war Berners returned to London. I was a guest

of his on each of my English visits. I remember with special

pleasure an October weekend in the late 1930s in Faring-

don, his country home near Oxford, where one slept in a

crystal bed, walked in deep meadows, rode roan horses,

and sat by brick fireplaces in Hepplewhite chairs. Faring-

dons atmosphere was not exclusively traditional, how-

ever. Meals were served in which all the food was of one

color pedigree; i.e., if Lord Berners 's mood was pink, lunch


might consist of beet soup, lobster, tomatoes, strawberries.

And outside, a flock of pink pigeons might fly overhead,

for Lord Berners's pigeons were sprayed with ( harmless

)

cosmetic dyes; my wife Vera used to send him saffron dye

from France, and a blue powder which he used for making

blue mayonnaise.

Lord Berners knew of my interest in old English music

and once promised to present me with the complete works

of Purcell. I think if he were to visit my home today noth-

ing would please him more than the discovery that mylibrary contains more old English music than any other

kind.

Faringdon House

Berkshire

gth January 2919

Cher ami, Do you know that I have been bombarding you with

letters and post cards from Rome for many months with no re-

sult? The Swiss border is a bad joke, and I suppose you have re-

ceived nothing. In any case, Ive had no answer. Meanwhile,

however, I saw Carlo Ponti in Paris who gave me news of you.

He was full of enthusiasm about the Ragtime which you had

played him. I was a few days in London, also, where I saw

Diaghilev and the Ballet several times. We celebrated the NewYear together. I think he will stay in London until March and

then go to Monte Carlo. I also saw Lady Cunard and Beecham,

who talked about you a great deal. Beecham would like to play

The Nightingale—has he told you about it? He is always very

much in the clouds.

Recently IVe written three small pieces for orchestra—

Chinoiserie, Valse sentimentale, and Kasatchok—and they are to

be played in Manchester on 8th March. I am pleased about this

performance because, for the moment, Manchester has the best

orchestra in England and the conducter will do them very well.

I expect to stay in England until March, and then go back to

Rome.

PORTRAITS MEMOIRES 8l

Did you know that I had changed my name and am no longer

Tyrwhitt? My aunt—or rather my uncle—d heritage—died.

Unfortunately I inherit only the title, with a lot of taxes to be

paid.

I would so much like to see you. I beg you to write me a little

note and tell me what you are doing just now.

Your very devoted Berners

My address is:

Faringdon House

Faringdon

Berkshire, England

ROYAUT&

R.C. You must have met many of the kings and queens

of Europe at gala performances in the early Diaghilev days?

7.S. No, for I contrived to avoid their official courtesies

when I could. I do remember a few such confrontations,

however, and among these the most impressive was mypresentation to Queen Alexandra in her box at Covent Gar-

den after a performance of The Firebird in 1912. I had

tried to escape this also, but Diaghilev begged me to go,

and Lady Ripon promised to be present and to help me.

The Queen looked like a birthday cake—she wore a tall

wig and was very rosily made up. She smiled at me but

said nothing; as she was quite deaf, however, and as this

affliction of hers was universally known, any compliment

about my music would not have been in order. Most likely

the poor woman had not the vaguest notion who I was or

what I was doing there.

I knew Alfonso XIII of Spain rather better than this. As

a balletomane who hardly ever missed a performance of

our company in Madrid, he often invited Diaghilev and

me to his loge. I remember a soiree he gave for the dancers

and artists of our troupe in some private rooms of the


theater where we were playing. I was seated between

Queen Maria and the Queen Mother. I spoke German with

the latter, and French with the two sovereigns, though

the King himself did not remain at the table but walked

about helping to serve us. ( Harold Nicolson's description,

in People and Things, of the solemn annual ceremony in

which Alfonso had to wash the feet of a group of beggars

gathered from the streets has curiously reminded me of

this evening. ) Alfonso was a kind man, but he was given

to uttering the most awful sottises: "Man cher, il faut que

vous composez une musique pour les coupoles des eglises

Russes" which is the sort of remark the Russian Grand

Dukes used to make. He wore a medallion portrait of the

Emperor Charles V on his chest, which invited all wholooked at him to compare the family features of the an-

cestral and the living King.

I also remember being presented to Queen Marie of Ru-

mania, King Carols mother, the day after a concert in

Bucharest in which I played my piano concerto; I think it

was in 1925. The Queen had sent me an invitation which

my Rumanian friends considered to be indeclinable. Ac-

cordingly, I went to the Royal Palace, where I was es-

corted to an anteroom and left in the presence of several

ladies-in-waiting, who were very eager to hear about Paris

and kept asking me questions. One of them wanted to know

what I thought was the most interesting thing in that city.

I said the "marche aux puces" but the word "puces"

seemed to shock them a good deal and they were silent.

The Queen was both beautiful and a bluestocking: she had

been an author herself, like that other Rumanian queen,

Carmen Sylva. She was most gracious to me, and she even

sent me to her bedroom to show me her fine collection of

icons.

Except for a few chance meetings and one luncheon


with the present Queen Mother of Belgium, who wanted

to commission a violin concerto from me, and for a brief

presentation to the Queen of Holland (at The Hague in

1952), these are all the queens (of countries) I have

known.

Some Musical Questions

The song people praise is always the latest thing*

Telemachus, trans, by W. H. D. Rouse.

R.C. For whom do you compose?

I.S. For myself and the hypothetical other. Or, rather, this

is an ideal achieved by only a very few composers. Most

of us write for an audience, as, for example, Haydn:".

. . . You ask me for an opera buffa. ... If you intend

to produce it on a stage in Prague ... I cannot comply

with your wish because all my operas are far too closely

connected with our personal circle (Esterh&z) and more-

over they would not produce the proper effect which I

calculated in accordance with the locality." And, in another

letter: "I have to change many things [in a symphony] for

the English public." But this does not mean that an artist

compromises himself when he considers an audience and

its tastes. Hamlet and Don Giovanni were written for real

audiences, while, at the same time, the authors of these

masterpieces had certainly first composed for themselves

and the hypothetical other.

PATRONAGER.C. Most of your music was composed on commission.

Has this circumstance affected the course of your art; that

is, have the nature or specifications of a commission ever

helped to determine your musical direction, or perhaps


imposed a limitation on the musical substance? Wouldyou comment on the role of the commission in contempo-

rary music in general?

I.S. The trick, of course, is to choose one's commission, to

compose what one wants to compose and to get it com-

missioned afterward, and I myself have had the luck to do

this in many instances. But, to reply to your question, I

attribute hardly any influence on the direction or the sub-

stance of my music to the circumstances of commissions.

Though Diaghilev had confronted me with Pergolesi's

music, suggesting and finally commissioning me to write

a ballet based upon it, and though this circumstance did

undoubtedly lead to a new appreciation of eighteenth-cen-

tury classicism on my part, I consider that I created the

possibility of the commission as much as it created me,

and that Pulcinella, though it may have seemed to be an

arbitrary step at the time, was an entirely logical step for

me.

But, while I minimize the importance of commissions in

relation to my own art, I believe that most new music is

influenced and, even to some extent, predetermined by

them. A certain kind of product is expected—however free

the terms of a commission may seem to be. For example,

a piece of music commissioned for performance by an

American symphony orchestra is expected to be performa-

ble after four to six hours of rehearsal, to be standard in

instrumentation, in length, and, since these standards tend

to suggest others, standard in style—i.e., somewhere be-

tween Schoenberg and Stravinsky, but domesticated. The

composer cannot stray very far from this pattern, e.g.,

produce a two-minute piece requiring thirty-five hours of

rehearsal and twenty extra instruments and written in a

style of such originality that the conductor's contract will

be canceled if he plays it. (This particular set of conditions

SOME MUSICAL QUESTIONS 87

is almost exactly reversed in the major radio stations of

West Germany. Funds and rehearsal time for new music

are abundant there and—this is my point—the styles of the

new music, for better or worse—that is not the point—are,

from a performing point of view, of a corresponding com-

plexity.) I do not say that a composer cannot write per-

sonal and original music in these conditions; I do say that,

inevitably, conditions create patterns.

Probably the most significant difference between the

role of the commission today and in the past is the ques-

tion of utility. Or, at any rate, I imagine that music was

commissioned in the past to satisfy an actual need. The

commissions of a Renaissance duke, of the Church, of an

Esterhazy or Diaghilev, were of this sort. Actual, i.e., com-

mercial, uses for new music of a high, i.e., noncommercial,

quality do still exist, of course—the new concerto for a

violinist, the new symphony for the Philharmonic, etc.—

but whether the music is really needed for itself and not

for some adjunctive value, namely, publicity, is often diffi-

cult to determine. I doubt, for example, that some of the

commissioners of my own later music have paid what they

have paid just for their musical pleasure. But this is still

utility—no matter the motive. In the main, however, the

need for new cantatas, string quartets, symphonies, is

wholly imaginary, and commissioning organizations, like

the Ford, and the Rockefeller, are really only buying up

surplus symphonies as the government buys up surplus

corn. In fact, the need for such music is so hopelessly non-

actual that the commissioners are now obliged to try to

buy the need for the symphony as well as the symphony.

Great, i.e., immortal, music creates its own need; whether

or not it happened to be commissioned should be a private

economic fact of interest only to the composer. Webern's

instrumental songs were not commissioned, nor did they


meet any demand; no performing organization was capa-

ble of presenting them at the time they were written. In

fact, this music which is so consequential at present

is a perpetual embarrassment to the whole idea of com-

mission-for-use. Nonetheless, even Webern could compose

music on commission. Thus his symphony for the League

of Composers; it probably scandalized the League, and

everybody else, but that couldn't have mattered to Webern.

But while the composer is guided by his genius (if he

has any, and if he hasn't, he doesn't matter ) , what guides

the commissioner? I have just seen a list of composers re-

cently awarded commissions of several thousands of dol-

lars by one of the foundations. As I know Music and, also,

some of the music of some of these composers, I think the

foundation concerned would have been wiser and kinder

if it had fined some of these people the same amount of

money, for money will not enrich their music, nor discour-

age the fulsome ideas of "success" and "career" such peo-

ple pursue and believe to be theirs by the compliments of

reviewers who automatically compliment their sort of

trash. I have had my own experience with commissioners,

too, a brush with Anti-Maecenas himself—a scion of gro-

cery stores and sciolist of "modern art"—who would have

commissioned The Rakes Progress from me, had I agreed

to his condition that he should sit in judgment while I

played my music to him at the piano.

Do you remember Sigismondo Malatesta's letter to

Giovanni di Medici asking for an artist to beautify the

newly plastered walls of the Tempio Malatesta with

frescoes? In Pound's version, Sigismondo wishes to promise

the painter, whoever he may be, that he

. . . can work as he likes,

or waste his time as he likes,

never lacking provision.


That should be read by anyone who intends to com-

mission an artist.

R.C. Has music ever been suggested to you by, or has a

musical idea ever occurred to you from, a purely visual

experience of movement, line, or pattern?

I.S. Countless times, I suppose, though I remember only

one instance in which I was aware of such a thing. This

was during the composition of the second of my Three

Pieces for string quartet. I had been fascinated by the

movements of Little Tich, whom I had seen in London

in 1914, and the jerky, spastic movement, the ups and

downs, the rhythm—even the mood or joke of the music—

which I later called Eccentric, was suggested by the art

of this great clown ( and "suggested" seems to me the right

word, for it does not try to approfondir the relationship,

whatever it is).

Incidentally, these pieces were not influenced by

Schoenberg or Webern, as has been said—at least not to

my conscious knowledge. I knew no music by Webern in

1914, and of Schoenberg only Pierrot Lunaire. But, though

my pieces are perhaps thinner in substance and more re-

petitive than music by Schoenberg and Webern of the

same date, they are also very different in spirit, and

mark, I think, an important change in my art. In spite of

the obvious recollection of Petroushka in Eccentric, it

seems to me these Three Pieces look ahead to the Pieces

Faciles for piano duet of one year later, and from the

Pieces Faciles to my so aberrant "neoclassicism" ( in which

category, nevertheless, and without knowing it was that,

I have managed to compose some not unpleasing music )

.

R.C. How did you happen to use the "Jambe en beds'*

melody in Petroushka?

I.S. A hurdy-gurdy played it every afternoon beneath my


window in Beaulieu (near Nice), and since it struck meas a good tune for the scene I was then composing, I wrote

it in. I did not think whether the composer might still be

living or the music protected by copyright, and Maurice

Delage, who was with me, was of the opinion that the

"melody must be very old." Then, several months after the

premiere, someone informed Diaghilev that the tune had

been composed by a Mr. Spencer, a gentleman still very

much alive and resident in France. Since 1911, therefore,

a share of Petroushka s royalties has gone to Mr. Spencer

or his heirs. I do not cite this to grieve about it, however: I

should pay for the use of someone else's property. But I

do not think it fair that I have to pay, as I must, a sixth

of all royalties deriving from purely musical (nonstaged)

performances of Petroushka, even of excerpts, such as the

"Russian Dance," to the co-author of the libretto.1

1 The injustices of copyright laws and nonlaws would add a complicated

chapter to my "life" and demand a reinterpretation of some of my com-

posing activity. Those who imagine that my works make me rich do not

realize that everything I composed before 1931 (I became a French

citizen in 1934, and this citizenship extended authors' rights retrospectively

for three years) was and is unprotected in the United States: the United

States and the U.S.S.R. failed to sign the Berne copyright convention. I do

not receive performance rights for The Firebird, which, as one of the most

popular pieces of music composed in this century, would have made me a

"millionaire" ( though, of course, for the good of my soul, I do not aspire to

be any such thing).

The Firebird, Petroushka, and he Sacre du Printemps were pirated in the

United States and have been perfonned there free for the last thirty-five

years. I tried to protect the music I composed after these three ballets by

having an American editor sign my compositions—a humiliating expedient,

though Albert Spalding, who kindly gave his name, was so obviously

not a real editor. This stratagem covered only those less frequently per-

fonned works of the 1920s, however, which it would not pay a pirate to

copy. When I became an American citizen in 1945 1 prepared new versions

of almost all the music I had composed before 1931. These versions vary

from complete rewritings, like Petroushka and the Symphonies of WindInstruments, to the mere correcting of printers' errors—as in the case of the

Capriccio and Symphony of Psalms. But the three popular and lucrative

early ballets are still far more commonly played in the old, pirated editions.

SOME MUSICAL QUESTIONS Ql

The "Jambe en bois" incident might have had a sequel

years later with the "Happy Birthday" melody in the

Greeting Prelude I wrote for Pierre Monteux's eightieth

birthday (a piece I had already sketched out in 1950 for

a project that did not materialize). I must have assumed

this melody to be in the category of folk music, too, or, at

least, to be very old and dim in origin. As it turned out,

the author was alive, but, graciously, did not ask for an

indemnity.

R.C. To what extent does your Russian music, especially

Renard and Les Noces, make use of folk melody?

I.S. There is no conscious use of folk melody whatever in

Renard, and only one of the themes of Les Noces

4 rr rj JrJ Tr ir J

is folk-derived. This theme, incidentally, was given me by

my friend Stepan Mitusov at least ten years before I madeuse of it in the final tableau of Les Noces. Excellent collec-

tions of Russian folk music by Tchaikovsky and Liadov,

and a more or less good one by Rimsky-Korsakov, had been

published; all of these were familiar to me, of course, and

while I did not actually turn to folk music as source ma-

terial, I was undoubtedly influenced by it. The song

"Down St. Peter's Road" in Petroushka ( St. Petersburg was

called simply "Peter" in the peasant villages—"Are you go-

ing to Peter?") was taken from Tchaikovsky's collection.

There are also three folk melodies in The Firebird, the

two "Khorovod" themes

I like a story about Schoenberg and an early piece of his that was also un-

protected. Someone suggested to him that he change the score, rewrite a

quarter note as two tied eighths, for instance, so that the piece could becopyrighted as a new version. Schoenberg's reply was, "I can't changeanything—it's perfect already."

9* MEMORIES AND COMMENTARIES

ifljJ^'JJjJj^JJand

j J J J J J J J -T3 Jj.pand the theme of the Finale

$ ii °ld J ij^pwhich had a dotted rhythm in the original. I do not re-

member which of the three collections supplied which

themes, however.

The opening bassoon melody in he Sacre du Printemps

is the only folk melody in that work. It came from an

anthology of Lithuanian folk music I found in Warsaw,

and not from Borodin or Cui, as some critics have suggested;

the anthology was a recent publication. And, to my knowl-

edge, none of my Russian songs—Pribaoutki, the Four Rus-

sian Peasant Choruses, the Four Russian Songs, the

Berceuses du Chat—contains folk material. If any of these

pieces sounds like aboriginal folk music, it may be because

my powers of fabrication were able to tap some uncon-

scious "folk" memory. In each case, however, the syllables

and words of the songs dictated the music. The "Balalaika"

in my Pieces Faciles is also my original melody—like a folk

song, of course, but not directly borrowed. One other work


of mine, not "Russian" and therefore not in your category,

borrows extensively from folk music. All the themes in myNorwegian Moods were taken from a collection of Nor-

wegian folk music my wife had found in a secondhand

bookstore in Los Angeles—and not from Grieg, as some

writers on my music have stated!

R.C. What prompted you to arrange The Star-Spangled

Banner?

I.S. I undertook the arrangement at the suggestion of a

pupil—a composer, rather, who visited me twice a week

to have his works recomposed—and partly because I was

obliged to begin my concerts during the war with The

Star-Spangled Banner, the existing arrangements of which

seemed to me very poor. My version was composed in Los

Angeles on 4th July, 1941, and performed shortly after

that by an orchestra and Negro chorus conducted by mypupil's son-in-law. After this performance I sent the manu-

script to Mrs. F. D. Roosevelt for a war-fund auction, but

my major seventh chord in the second strain of the piece,

the part patriotic ladies like best, must have embarrassed

some high official, for my score was returned with an

apology. I then gave it to Klaus Mann, who soon suc-

ceeded in selling it for a similar purpose. I performed it

myself for the first time with the Boston Symphony Or-

chestra in the winter of 1944. I stood with my back to the

orchestra and conducted the audience, who were sup-

posed to sing but didn't. Though no one seemed to notice

that my arrangement differed from the standard offering,

the next day, just before the second concert, a police com-

missioner appeared in my dressing room and informed meof a Massachusetts law forbidding any "tampering" with

national property. He said that policemen had already

been instructed to remove my arrangement from the music


stands. I argued that if an Urtext of The Star-Spangled

Banner existed, it was certainly infrequently played in

Massachusetts—but to no avail. I do not know if my version

has been performed since. It ought to be, for it makes the

linear and harmonic best of the material, and is certainly

superior to any other version I have heard. (The compli-

ment to myself in this comparison is very small indeed.)

ELECTRONIC MUSIC

R.C. Have you any further observations to make about

electronic "music"?

I.S. I would still repeat the criticisms I made of it two

years ago—namely, I do not see why a medium so rich in

sound possibilities should sound so poor; and, though

shape and composition are more in evidence and the liai-

sons more convincing in the newer pieces, the impression

of desultoriness is still a main impression. At the same time

the newer electronic music has more direction—a fact I at-

tribute to the clearer division between those who are try-

ing to create a new and purely electronic soimd and those

who are trying to transform existing sounds, instrumental

and otherwise; some attractive results have been attained

on both sides of this split. Now, however, with the appear-

ance of the R.C.A. synthesizer, the whole electronic-music

experiment up to the present can only be regarded as a

prenatal stage in its development.

Also, many composers have now begun to see a use for

electronically produced sound, mixed or used adjunctively

with traditional instrumental sound—though no one, I

think, has been entirely successful in bridging the modu-

latory ground between the two. I myself am interested in

this problem of bridging together the live and the mechani-

cal. In fact, my first idea, in 1917, for the instrumentation


of Les Noces was to use mechanical instruments, player

pianos, together with ordinary orchestral instruments—an

idea I abandoned only because I did not know how to co-

ordinate and control both elements.

Perhaps the real future of electronic music is in the

theater. Imagine the ghost scene in Hamlet with electronic

"white noise" entering the auditorium from several direc-

tions (Berio's Omaggio a Joyce is perhaps a preview of

this kind of thing ) . But this very theatricality—which elec-

tronicians will object to as more for the effect of another

art than for the thing itself—exposes another problem.

"Concerts" of electronic music are, in fact, more like

stances. With nothing to look at on the stage—no exhibition

of orchestra and conductor, but only conduit-speaker

boxes and, suspended from the ceiling, mobile reflectors—

what is the audience to look at? Surely not at anything so

arbitrary as the "symbolic" colors and pictures of the San

Francisco "Vortex" experiment.

I have uncovered a Diaghilev letter that should be of at

least historical interest in the discussion of "Futuristic"

music, musique concrete, and electronic music. It is dated

Rome, 8th March, 1915, and was sent to me at the Hotel

Victoria, Chateau d'Oex, Switzerland. It is naive, of course,

but not more so than the "Futuristic" composers them-

selves; and it is a good example of Diaghilev's flair.

.... Now to something else, and much more important. Anidea of genius has come to my mind. After having thirty-two

rehearsals of the Liturgie, we have concluded that absolute

silence is death . . . and that aerial space is not absolute silence

and cannot be. Silence doesn't exist and couldn't exist. There-

fore, dance action must be supported not by music but by

sounds, id est, by filling the ear harmonically. The source of this

"filling" should not be recognizable. The changes of these har-

monic junctures, or liaisons, must not be remarked by the ear—


one sound merely joins or enters another, id est, there is no ob-

vious rhythm whatsoever, because one does not hear either the

beginning or the end of the sound. The projected instruments

are: bells wrapped round with cloth and other material, aeolian

harps, guzli,2 sirens, tops, and so on. Of course all this has to be

worked out, but for that purpose Marinetti proposes we get to-

gether for some days in Milan and discuss it with the leader of

their "orchestra," and examine all their instruments. Also, he

guarantees that at this time he will bring Pratella to Milan so he

can show us his newest works which are, according to him, for-

midables. We could do it between the 15th and 20th of March.

Telephone me at Naples, Hotel Vesuvio, if you can come to

meet us in Milan. You will see many new Futuristic studios;

from there we will go together to Montreux. I urge you very

strongly to come—it is very important for the future. I will send

you some money for the trip immediately. As for the concert of

Prokofiev in Geneva, he can give it as a benefit for the Serbs if he

is busy on the 20th. Then, until we meet soon,

je f embrace, Seriosha

P.S. Compose Noces quickly. I am in love with it.

VARfiSE

R.C. Some of this might be a description of the music of

Edgar Varese. How do you esteem Varese?

LS. There is nobility in his noise, and he himself is a noble

figure in our music (how much more honest to have kept

his long silence than to have written the apish music of so

many others ) . And it is useless to remark, as many do, that

his music is limited and repetitive, and that after he had

done the one kind of thing he had nowhere to go. The

point is he had done the one thing. I have never heard

Ameriques and Arcana (they look as though the shadow

of he Sacre had fallen over them), but I do know and

greatly admire Ionization, Octandre, Density 21.5, and

2 The goat plays this instrument in Renard.


Integrates, and I consider Varese's present activity—tape-

recording the sound of New York City—of the highest value,

and not merely as documentation, but as material of art.

WEBERN

R.C. Have you changed your mind in any particular about

Webern?

I.S. No; he is the discoverer of a new distance between

the musical object and ourselves and, therefore, of a new

measure of musical time; as such he is supremely important.

But Webern's importance is now recognized even by the

matinee idols. A celebrated conductor who recently per-

formed one of the two pieces by him that could be called

popular conceded in an interview that 'Webern does have

an influence on music," a statement comparable in politics

to Eisenhower's discovering communists in China.

Webern the man has now begun to emerge, too, with

the publication of his letters to Berg, Humplik, and Jone.

The Webern of the letters is, first of all, profoundly re-

ligious, and not only institutionally (extraordinary,

though, that he should compare the six movements of his

Second Cantata to a Kyrie, a Gloria, a Credo, a Benedictus,

a Sanctus, an Agnus Dei), but in the simple holiness of

his feeling toward each of God's essents (a flower, a

mountain, "silence") as well. Music is a mystery to him, a

mystery he does not seek to explain. At the same time, no

other meaning exists for him but music. He stands before

the Parthenon friezes and marvels at the sculptor's "con-

ception," which he compares to his own "composition

method . . . always the same thing in a thousand different

ways" (in another letter: ".. . the meaning is always the

same, however different the means"). He never explains

beyond that, and he even admits, in one letter, to being


severely tried by the necessity of explanation: "I am some-

times . . . tortured by teaching/'

He is like a village priest in that his world does not ex-

tend beyond his village—indeed, he makes my world seem

a million miles away. His manners and address are also

both villageoises and priestly. He contains no word of

technical jargon (to Berg: "Art must be simple") and no

aesthetics ( "I don't understand what 'classic* and roman-

tic' mean"). He is infinitely patient and, of course, he takes

infinite pains,3 but composing is entirely natural to him. Hedoes not have a rebellious heart—indeed, he accepts with-

out criticism the musical tradition to which he was born—

nor has he any conception of himself as a radical composer;

he was what he was wholly apart from the so-called

Zeitgeist. This Webern will embarrass "Webemists." They

will blush for their master's "naivety" and "provincialism."

They will cover his nakedness and look the other way. Andthis turning away will coincide, too, with a reaction against

his music (in favor of Berg's; I hear everywhere now that

Webern's series are too symmetrical, that his music makes

one too conscious of twelves, and that "Za structure sSrielle

chez Berg est plus cach6e"; for me, however, Berg's music,

compared with Webern's, is like an old woman about

whom one says, "How beautiful she must have been whenshe was young!"). Webern was too original—i.e., too purely

himself. Of course the entire world had to imitate him; of

course it would fail; of course it will blame Webern. Nomatter, though. The desperate contrivance of most of the

music now being charged to his name can neither diminish

his strength nor stale his perfection. He is a perpetual

Pentecost for all who believe in music.

8 That his music cost him terrible birth pains, I have no doubt. Thefew musical examples in the letters indicate how deeply he had been

concerned with the relation of note values to musical substance (and

tempo, meter, beat), and how this problem alone involved him in

several stages of rewriting.


R.C. Would you analyze your own composing process in

any part of one of your more recent pieces—in, for example,

the little Epitaphium?

IS. I began the Epitaphium with the flute-clarinet duet

( which I had originally thought of as a duet for two flutes

and which can be played by two flutes; the piece was

written to be performed in a program with Webern's songs,

op. 15, which use the flute-clarinet combination). In the

manner I have described in our previous conversations, I

heard and composed a melodic-harmonic phrase. I cer-

tainly did not (and never do) begin with a purely serial

idea, and, in fact, when I began I did not know, or care,

whether all twelve notes would be used. After I had written

about half the first phrase I saw its serial pattern, however,

and then perhaps I began to work toward that pattern.

The constructive problem that first attracted me in the two-

part counterpoint of the first phrase was the harmonic one

of minor seconds. The flute-clarinet responses are mostly

seconds, and so are the harp responses, though the harp

part is sometimes complicated by the addition of third,

fourth, and fifth harmonic voices. (The harp in this piece,

as in all my music, must be pinched pres de la table to

produce the sound I want; incidentally, the deep bass notes

of the harp are, I think, the most beautiful on the instru-

ment.)

Only after I had written this little twelve-note duet did

I conceive the idea of a series of funeral responses between

bass and treble instruments, and, as I wanted the whole

piece to be very muffled, I decided that the bass instru-

ment should be a harp. The first bar of the harp part was,

however, written last. As I worked the music out, it became

a kind of hymn, like PurcelTs Funeral Music for Queen

Mary. There are four short antiphonal strophes for the

harp, and four for the wind duet, and each strophe is a


complete order of the series—harp: O, I, R, RI; winds: O,

RI, R, L

I have discovered new (to me) serial combinations in

the Movements for Piano and Orchestra, however ( and I

have discovered in the process, too, that I am becoming

not less but more of a serial composer; those younger col-

leagues who already regard "serial" as an indecent word,

in their claim to have exhausted all that is meant by it

and to have gone far beyond, are, I think, greatly in error),

and the Movements are the most advanced music from the

point of view of construction of anything I have composed.

No theorist could determine the spelling of the note order

in, for example, the flute solo near the beginning, or the

derivation of the three Fs announcing the last movement

simply by knowing the original order, no matter howunique the combinatorial properties of this particular

series. Every aspect of the composition was guided by serial

forms, the sixes, quadrilaterals, triangles, etc. The fifth

movement, for instance (which I had to rewrite twice),

uses a construction of twelve verticals. The gamma and

delta hexachords in this movement are more important

than the A and B, too. Five orders are rotated instead of

four, with six alternates for each of the five, while, at the

same time, the six work in all directions, as though through

a crystal.

Now that I have mentioned my new work, I should add

that its rhythmic language is also the most advanced I have

so far employed; perhaps some listeners might even detect

a hint of serialism in this too. My polyrhythmic combi-

nations are meant to be heard vertically, however, unlike

those of some of my younger colleagues. Though parallels

are not equivalents, look at Josquin for a parallel: that

marvelous second Agnus Dei (the three-voice one) in the


Missa VHomtne arme, or at Baude Cordier's pour le default

du dieu Bacchus, or, for even more remarkable examples,

at the Cyprus Codex.

^JJUJ^Ht-J-rrr|«r -.rr/ lRB

Pourle <fef [fault]

6^ J Jj&l^jJ I^ J^'ft J^&iu 1 Ij^'j ji«j>j.-'- ,

j-ifcJL j!Each section of the piece is confined to a certain range

of instrumental timbre (another suggestion of serialism?),

but the five movements are related more by tempo than

by contrasts of such things as timbre, "mood," "character";

in a span of only twelve minutes, the contrast of an andante

with an allegro would make little sense; construction must

replace contrast. Perhaps the most significant development

in the Movements, however, is the tendency toward anti-

tonality—in spite of long pedal point passages such as

the clarinet trill at the end of the third movement, and

the sustained string harmonics in the fourth movement. I

am amazed at this myself, in view of the fact that in Threni

simple triadic references occur in every bar.

FILM MUSIC AND FILMS

R.C. Have you ever considered writing music for films?

LS. Yes, several times, and in two instances I had even

begun to compose, not "film music," which is aural ere-

thism, an emotional counterpart to scenery, but music for

film use; my Four Norwegian Moods were originally in-


tended for a film about the Nazi invasion of Norway, and

my Scherzo a la Russe began as music for another war

film, with a Russian setting. Neither score differed in any

way from its present concert form, however, though I re-

orchestrated the Scherzo for the Paul Whiteman band

later; I could conceive of music for films only as incidental

music, which is what these pieces are. That this conception

is quite wrong from the film industry's point of view, I amwell aware, but it is as far as I will go, and I can probably

count myself fortunate that none of the proposals Holly-

wood has made me ever reached a contractual stage.

I do enjoy negotiating with film people, though, for only

rarely do they try to obscure their motives with nonsense

about art. They want my name, not my music—I was even

offered $100,000 to pad a film with music, and when I

refused, was told that I could receive the same money if

I were willing to allow someone else to compose the music

in my name. The classical Hollywood story is not mine but

Schoenberg's, however. The great composer, who earned

almost nothing from his compositions, was invited to sup-

ply music for The Good Earth, at a fee that must have

seemed like Croesus's fortune to him, but with impossible

artistic conditions attached. He refused, saying, "You kill

me to keep me from starving to death." Incidentally,

Schoenberg's Accompaniment to a Cinematographic Scene

is by far the best piece of real film music ever written, an

ironic triumph if there ever was one, for the film itself was

imaginary.

I first saw a moving picture in St. Petersburg in 1904. (

I

am certain of the date, as it was shortly after Tchekhov's

death, an event that impressed me, though the fact of his

illness was well known, and though I was never a great

admirer of his—to my taste—too intellectualized litera-

ture. ) I remember waiting a long while in a small, crowded


room and then seeing a film that proved to be an advertise-

ment for Swiss chocolate. A woman stood by a table, pour-

ing hot chocolate into a cup, and a child then swallowed

the contents of the cup. That was all. The whole perform-

ance lasted no longer than a Bagatelle by Webern, and

the cup and the liquid trembled terribly. A second short

film was shown, too: a conflagration in a Swedish match

factory.

My real interest in films began in 1912 with the first

Chaplins—at any rate, I seem to remember seeing a Chaplin

film then, in Nice, in company with Michel Larionov, but

if that is not accurate, I am positive I saw a Chaplin film

with Diaghilev in Santander, in 1915. 1 also remember Les

Mystdres de New York, in Lausanne, I think in 1912. This

was one of the first of the "to-be-continued-next-week"

serialized adventures, and though it was the most shame-

less chyepouha, the insidious secret of films is such that I

was there again each next week.

Chaplin was an event in my life, as he was in Diaghilev's.

His so-prodigal inventiveness was a continual amazement

to me; but I was touched also by the moral point of each

Chaplin episode, as well as by the moral of the whole film.

( For example, the lunch scene on the tempest-driven boat

where he tries to impale a single petit pois rolling about

his plate like the ball in a pinball machine. The Chaplin

touch is in the moral ending: When finally he picks up the

pea with his fingers, a lady looks on in disgust.) I met

Chaplin in Hollywood in 1937 and we became friends. I

had concerts there at the time, and he came with me to myrehearsals. For me, Chaplin is Hollywood, in its brief age

of art.

Film music is significant, in many ways, of course, but

not as music, which is why the proposition that better com-


posers could produce better film music is not necessarily

true: the standards of the category defeat higher stand-

ards. Still, I will express my respect for the craftsmanship

of the many good musicians employed by the films, es-

pecially the arrangers, who are often responsible for more

than the word "arranger" would seem to imply; in fact,

it is said that in Hollywood Haydn would have been

credited as the composer of the Variations on a Theme by

Haydn and Brahms as their "arranger."

"Teaching makes of art a virtue."

The Lord of Sugawara

(in the Bunraku play by Chikamatsu)

R.C. Why did you never become a teacher?

7.S. I have very little gift for teaching, and no disposition

for it: I am inclined to think that the only pupils worth

having would become composers with or without my help

( though I am not sure that I would say the same thing in

the same way about Berg and Webern in relation to

Schoenberg). My instinct is to recompose, and not only

students' works, but old masters' as well. When composers

show me their music for criticism, all I can say is that I

would have written it quite differently. Whatever interests

me, whatever I love, I wish to make my own ( I am probably

describing a rare form of kleptomania). I regret my in-

ability, however, and I am full of veneration for Sessions,

Hindemith, Kfenek, Messiaen, and those few other com-

posers who possess the teacher's gift.

R.C. Your remarks about "virtuosi" ( in the first volume of

our "conversations") might easily be misunderstood. Would

you describe the kind of performer you mean?

7.S. I mean, of course, the false virtuosi, the virtuosi with-

out virtu, for the term is no longer prestigious; but I should

SOME MUSICAL QUESTIONS I05

have distinguished between past and present examples,

and in the present between the true and the false. Whereas

the virtuosi of other eras collaborated closely with new

music in exploring new instrumental possibilities and ex-

tending technique, the virtuosi of today are inclined to pro-

nounce the most interesting new music—no matter how

often 'lesser" performers play it—unplayable. But true

virtuosi do still exist. They are the exceptional instrumen-

talists—the flute player in Los Angeles (Gleghorn), the

clarinetist in Paris ( Deplus ) , and others, who really have

attained new instrumental and musical powers through

their performances of new music. They are unknown, of

course, but their value to music is greater than that of

their famous colleagues.

I would define the false virtuoso as that performer who

plays only nineteenth-century music, even when it is by

Bach and Mozart; or as the kind of performer who should

begin his recitals with the encores, since they are what he

plays best.

PERFORMANCE AND INTERPRETATION

R.C. Would you comment on any recent performances of

Haydn, Mozart, or Beethoven you may have heard?

I.S. A few days ago I was exposed to a Toscanini record-

ing of Beethoven's First Symphony. The Adagio molto in-

troduction was played not adagio but andante, in an un-

divided beat of four, and badly played from the very first

chord, which was not unanimous. The Allegro was also

an absurdly fast Rossini-like tempo that obliterated phrase

accents and articulations, except in the little G-minor epi-

sode (cellos, basses, and oboe), where even Toscanini must

have sensed something wrong—for a moment his pace

slackened almost to the right tempo. And Toscanini's am-

l()6 M i:m oh ik.s and COMMENTARIES

bition throughout the movement seems to have been to

create climaxes, whether or not they coincided with Bee-

thoven's own climaxes and, especially, Beethoven's own

scale of climax. The second movement was also badly

played. At one place In the development section the strings

performed strict thirty-second notes after dotted notes.

Then, a few bars later, the winds doubly shortened these

thirty-seconds (as indeed they were right so to do). 4 The

strings, hearing themselves corrected, followed suit in the

next statement of this rhythm. But can Toscanini have

failed to hear such a thing? In any case, he did not hear

that the ritardando he applied to the beginning of the

recapitulation was insufferably gross, that the whole min-

uet and trio were so absurdly fast as to make no sense at

all, and that the last movement was not only too fast but

too slick as well, so that the finest passage in the symphony

—the dozen bars or so which open the development (Bars

96-108)—was reduced to insignificance.

I am not a doryphore, nor have I grievances against

Toscanini other than those just stated. I submit, however,

that these remarks are the sort that music critics should

make about Toscanini s or anybody else's performance 4 of

Beethoven's First Symphony; and until they (the critics)

are able to discern such realities of musical performance

("discern" and "criticize" have the same root, by the way)

they have no right to utter the hieratic nonsense about "in-

terpretation" they do in fact utter.

Two weeks ago I witnessed a concert of three sym-

phonies, one by Haydn, from the first Salomon series, Mo-

4 On the other hand, Hcethoven's Seventh Symphony h:is been mined by

shortening both the dot and the note after in every performance I havo

heard: after a while I -JJ J -I J

becomes a march:

JT2 JTI3


zart's A-Major (K. 201), and Beethoven's Second. I love

the Haydn for the different lengths of its sentences, but it

was stifled by tempi too fast and too slow—the Andante

was played adagio and both allegros were played prestis-

simo: the natural respiration of the music was everywhere

frustrated, and the performance was unreal—pulsation is

the reality of music. The next day, however, the reviewers'

only comment was that the strings had sounded like velvet

—though Haydn's strings should soimd like strings and

not like velvet. But the word "interpretation" was saved

for the Mozart. Now, the interpretative ground of this little

symphony is (a), beat: the first movement should be in

cut, i.e., 2/2 time and the last movement in 3/8, the bars

divided in half; and (b), style. That is all the interpreta-

tion possible; the word is a myth. But the really extraordi-

nary event of the concert was the introduction to the Bee-

thoven, for the conductor gave the first note of the

symphony, the thirty-second note, as a downbeat. His pur-

pose, of course, was to make the orchestra attack together,

but the character of the second note, and indeed of the

whole introduction, was thereby destroyed. One prepara-

tory upbeat is enough to accomplish a clean attack, but,

as this conductor's beat was like hot plasticene, he natu-

rally could not, by a simple motion, cause the whole

orchestra to feel a subdivision of thirty-second notes. Con-

cerning this, however, the reviewers said nothing.

R.C. What is academicism in music?

LS. Academicism results when the reasons for the rule

change, but not the rule; the academic composer is there-

fore concerned more with the old rule than with the newreality—though by "rule" I mean something nearer to

"principle"; a rule, in the simple sense, is a mere means

of conformity in an imitative exercise.


If the real end of academicism is knowledge itself, as I

think it is, then, academically speaking, I know very little.

Though I have worked all my life in sound, from an

academic point of view I do not even know what sound

is (I once tried to read Rayleigh's Theory of Sound but

was unable mathematically to follow its simplest explana-

tions ) . My knowledge is activity. I discover it as I work,

and I know it while I am discovering it, but only in a very

different way before and after.

R.C. How do you think the development of information

theory in music might affect your art?

7.S. I have always been interested in the theory of games

(since a childhood reading of Cardano, in fact), but this

has not meant anything to me as a composer or even

helped me at Las Vegas. I realize that choice is an exact

mathematical concept, and that I ought to be looking be-

yond the particular example for the process that generated

it ( even though the particular example is all that matters

to me ) . I realize, too, that a really comprehensive informa-

tion theory can explain "inspiration"—or, anyway, the

equation of its components—and, indeed, almost every-

thing else about my processes of musical communication.

But though I am confident these explanations would en-

lighten me, I am even more confident they would not help

me to compose. My attitude is merely proof that I am not

an intellectual, and therefore problems of explanation are

of no very great interest to me. To borrow G. E. Moore's

example—"I do not see how you can explain to anyone whodoes not already know it, what yellow' is"—I do not see

any means of explaining why I have chosen a certain note

if whoever hears it does not already know why when he

hears it.

R.C. What does "creation" mean to you?

I.S. Nothing. The word was already badly overloaded

SOME MUSICAL QUESTIONS log

when psychologists made it their propaganda term for what

was no more than a change in methodology: a child's scrib-

ble is not an "act of creation," nor is our intestinal function,

as Freud thought, since animals do as much and animals

cannot create; the word, which to Coleridge meant the

noblest operation of imagination, is now horribly debased.

Only God can create.

R.C. And "modern"?

l.S. The only sense in which I think "modern" can nowbe used must derive from, or so I imagine, a meaning simi-

lar to that of the devotio moderna of Thomas a Kempis.

It implies a new fervor, a new emotion, a new feeling. It

is "romantic," of course, and it suffers ( paschein, to suffer,

is also the root of pathos, incidentally), for it cannot accept

the world as is. "Modern" in this sense does not so muchmean or emphasize the appearance of a new style, though,

of course, a new style is part of it. Nor is it brought about

merely by its innovations, though innovations are part of

it too.

This is very far from the popular association of the word

with all that is newest and most shocking in the world of

sophisticated unmorality. I was once introduced to some-

one at a party with the recommendation, "Son Sacre du

Printemps est terriblement moderne." "Temblement"

meant "terribly good," of course. And Schoenberg's bon

mot, "My music is not modern, it is just badly played,"

depends on the same popular association of the word,

though Schoenberg himself, according to my meaning, is

a true, archetypal "modern."

CHROMATICISM

RC. You often associate "pathos" with chromaticism. Doyou really believe in an innate connection?

I.S. Of course not; the association is entirely due to con-


ventions, like those of musica riservata; artists believe not

in innate qualities but in art. Nevertheless, "chromaticism"

and "pathos" are connected, and the first musical use of

"chromatic," in the misura chromatica, was meant to indi-

cate a rhythmic change for expressive, i.e., pathetic, pur-

poses. I prefer to use chromatic in a limited sense, and

in relation to diatonic. But we have acquired the habit of

looking for our (post-Wagnerian) chromaticism in old

music, with the result that contexts are grossly distorted.

For example, in his setting of the funeral sentence, In the

midst of Life we are in Death, at the words "Art justly

displeased/' Purcell avoids the conventional cadence and

composes one that was certainly intended, in one sense,

to displease his audience: but the cadence pleases us in

another sense, far more than the conventional one would

have done. In fact, though, our whole approach to six-

teenth-century music is apt to be slanted toward a chro-

maticism that was really no more than a tiny development.

Willaert's Quid Non Ebrietas quartet,5 though it is not so

much chromatic as modulatory, was the only work of its

kind by Willaert (how I would like to have known Willaert,

this little man—you remember Calmo's description—whorestored Venice to its musical glory), and so were Lasso's

Alma Nemes and Hans Leo Hassler's Ad Dominum CumTribularer unique chromatic works by these masters. And,

though I do not know music by Stefano Rossetti and

Matheus Greiter other than the chromatic pieces Lowin-

sky has printed, the fact that only these pieces have gained

attention proves my point.

Incidentally, I should like to hear someone learned in

both sixteenth- and seventeenth-century music discuss a

notion of mine, based roughly on a few examples, that

5 Thanks to Professor Lowinsky, it need no longer be called the

Chromatic Duo.


the century of chromatic development from Clemens NonPapa through Rore and Wert to Marco da Gagliano, Luz-

zaschi, Macque (the beautiful Seconda Stravaganza) , and

Gesualdo, exceeds in sureness of harmonic movement and

in the use of dissonance the chromaticism of the operatic

composers of the seventeenth century—always excepting

Purcell. In fact, not until Bach do we find music as ad-

vanced, in our sense—the Bach of the chorale preludes and,

if he wrote it, of the Kleines Harmonisches Labyrinth—as

the motets and madrigals of the late sixteenth-century

masters.

But we cannot experience the full power of Gesualdo's

or any sixteenth-century master's chromatic expression pre-

cisely because we are unable to hear it contrasted with the

customary diatonic music which was its background ( and

because our ears have been corrupted by later music).

Huizinga remarks the greater contrasts of all things in the

late Middle Ages, and though his period is earlier than ours,

the contrast between chromatic and diatonic might be

added to his list. ".. . Illness and health presented a more

striking contrast; the cold and darkness of winter were

more real evils. Honors and riches . . . contrasted more

vividly with surrounding misery. . . . The contrast be-

tween silence and sound, darkness and light, like that

between summer and winter, was more strongly marked

than it is in our lives. The modern town hardly knows

silence or darkness in their purity, nor the effect of a

solitary light or a single distant cry."

"Chromaticism" means something different to each and

every composer today.

R.C. You often say you cannot "think" about composing

before you actually start to compose.

I.S. I do not try to "think" in advance—I can only start to

work and hope to leap a little in my spirit


R.C. What piece of new music has most attracted you in

the last year?

LS. Stockhausen's Gruppen. The title is exact: the music

really does consist of groups, and each group is admirably

composed according to its plan of volume, instrumenta-

tion, rhythmic pattern, tessitura, dynamics, various kinds

of highs and lows ( though perhaps the constant fluctuation

of highs and lows, a feature of this kind of music, is its very

source of monotony). Also, the music as a whole has a

greater sense of movement than any of Stockhausen's other

pieces (I have not yet heard Zyklus*), though I do not

think the form is more successful than that of the Zeitmasse.

Historically, I suppose, the chief significance of Gruppen

is in its post-serial inventions, but as my own chief interest

in music is still note-against-note counterpoint, and as

Stockhausen's is in pattern and shape, I may be excused

for remarking the exterior aspects of the piece.

The question of the three orchestras has aroused muchcomment. Actually, when the orchestras play separately

or overlap, their roles are very marked, but in the tutti

sections they simply sound like one orchestra, and this is

true of all poly-orchestral music, whether it is by Schutz or

Mozart or Charles Ives or anyone else.7 (It may not be

true of Stockhausen's new Caree, however.

)

The problem of the three conductors is more compli-

8 The score of which is very Cage-y, though very attractive to look at

too—one almost wishes it didn't have to be translated into sound but werea land of hand-drawn photo-electric sound (after a spectrum).

7 Winfned Zillig's astounding revelations (in The Score, June, 1959)about Schoenberg's preoccupation with multiple orchestras, and even with

what is now called "Musik im Raum," in Die Jakobsleiter have stolen the

thunder of the new generation: "Schoenberg expended much thought on

the acoustical problems of the off-stage orchestras. In a marginal note about

them, written in March 1926, he weighs up all the possibilities of their

relationship to one another. He even makes an attempt to design on paper

an apparatus which would enable the sound from the different orchestras


cated. If I were to blindfold three conductors and start

them beating 60 to a beat, they would not be together at

the end of even ten bars. Therefore, when the metronomic

indication for one orchestra is 70, for the second 113.5,

and for the third 94, these tempi are unattainable with any

exactitude by merely human conductors. What, in fact,

happens is that the conductors follow each other, juggle,

and adjust. Incidentally, this is also why I would rather

listen to than conduct one of the orchestras in Gruppen:

the business of synchronizing with the other conductors

and of concentrating on the details of one's own orchestra

makes the whole very difficult to hear.

Stockhausen's orchestra is full of remarkable sounds. Let

me cite only a few places: the cello and bass music at

Bar 16, for example; the solo guitar music at Bar 75, and

the music three bars before Bar 102. But perhaps the most

exciting sounds in the whole score are near the beginning

—the pizzicato third orchestra at Bar 27; the third orchestra

to be directed by means of a system of ducts to different parts of the con-

cert hall. He tries to compensate for the time-lag incurred by the journey-

ing of the sound from behind the stage to the various parts of the hall, by a

complicated rhythmical system of anticipating the beat.

"He comments on this again in a note written in English in 1944: 'Today,

October 1944, the problem of the "Fern" orchestras and "Fern"-Chore

would best be resolved by being played behind the scene, by soundproof

materials unaudible at the stage, but by microphones distributed so as to

appear at different places of the hall/ Schoenberg is prepared, then, to

substitute a simple modem microphone for the complicated acoustical

system conceived in 1926. But Schoenberg's aural imagination goes to even

further lengths. A note written in 1921 on the ending of Die Jakobsleiter

shows how he was taken with the idea of sound-complexes emerging from

different places and uniting only in the hall, that is to say, in the ear of the

listener. The note reads: 'Chorus and soloists, at first chiefly on the

platform, then gradually joined by the choruses stationed with the offstage

orchestras, so that in the end the music is streaming from all sides of the

hall.' Is this not like a prophecy of electronic music and of the most recent

experiments in spatio-acoustics, which are considered by the musical youth

of today to be the dernier crff"

ii4 MEMORIES AND COMMENTARIES

at Bars 63 to 68; and, especially the brass trills and flutter-

tongues at Bars 108 to 116.

The rhythmic construction of Gruppen is, I think, of the

greatest interest. For example, the following bar:

Vlns. <

Vlas.

which means that, without showing the actual rhythmic

relation of the notes, they should sound in this order:

#^

Ir rT Y ri r v? fr 1

R.C. Does the orchestral player or chorus singer in certain

types of new music understand his own role in the com-

position? For instance, when he plays one of the parts in

the bar from Stockhausens Gruppen you have quoted, is

he not performing a merely mechanical job which, in fact,

a mechanical agent might perform better?


I.S. Just how much do you think the choral singer under-

stood of his "role" in the structure and composition of, say,

the fourteenth-century motets in Dr. Apel's collection?

Much new music does appear to contain a large mechani-

cal element, of course, but whether or not the effort to per-

form it is mechanical depends on the performer and his

experience.

For example, I had heard several performances of

Webern's Variations for Orchestra in the last few years but

I have never been able to answer those critics of it who

maintained that the players were unable to understand

the inter-relationships of their roles without the score. Re-

cently, however, at a rehearsal of that work in Hamburg I

actually did observe musicians listening to each other, and

not only for the line of the music, but for its every nuance

as well. The conductor, therefore, ceased to be the usual

puppeteer and become a kind of monitor in a large work

of co-operation.

At the same time, a purely mechanical element does

exist in music today, and it might be better if it were iso-

lated and relegated to mechanical means. I am in sympathy

with Milton Babbitt when he says that he is "depressed

by the sight of duplicative"—Mr. Babbitt has his own vo-

cabulary—orchestral musicians."

R.C. Is any musical element still susceptible to radical ex-

ploitation and development?

I.S. Yes: pitch. I even risk a prediction that pitch will com-

prise the main difference between the "music of the future"

and our music, and I consider that the most important as-

pect of electronic music is the fact that it can manufacture

pitch. Our mid-twentieth-century situation, in regard to

pitch, might perhaps be compared to that of the mid-six-

teenth century, when, after Willaert and others had

proved the necessity of equal temperament, the great pitch

Il6 MEMORIES AND COMMENTARIES

experiments began—Zarlino's quarter-tone instrument,

Vincentino's thnty-nine-tones-to-the-octave archicembalo,

and others. These instruments failed, of course, and the

well-tempered clavier was established (though at least

three hundred years before Bach ) , but our ears are more

ready for such experiments now—mine are, at any rate.

I had been watching the Kuramatengu play in Osaka one

afternoon recently and had become accustomed to the Nohflute. Later, in a restaurant, I suddenly heard an ordinary

flute playing ordinary ( well-tempered ) music. I was

shocked, music apart—I think I could keep the music apart

anyway—by the expressive poverty of the tuning.

1912-AND AFTER

R.C. Do you see any similarities between the present

(postwar) years of musical "exploration" and "revolution"

and the era before the First World War; and, if so, do you

then foresee a decline from this "radical exploratory" move-

ment—a decline into formulation, such as the late 1920s

and 1930s might be considered to have been in relation

to the prewar years?

LS. I can hardly assess a development to which I myself

am still contributing, but the richest musical years in this

century do now seem to have been those immediately be-

fore the 1914 war, and, specifically, 1912, for to that date

belong Pierrot Lunaire, Jeux, the Altenberg Lieder, and

he Sacre du Printemps.8 The stage following the summit

8 he Sacre du Printemps is usually dated 1913, but it was completed a

full year before its performance.

The Altenberg, or Ansichtskarten Lieder, though still relatively unknown,

is one of the perfect works composed in this century and worthy of

comparison with any music by Webern or Schoenberg up to the same date.

Incidentally, it seems to me to approach very closely to Webern in form,

instrumentation, and, despite its Wagnerism, sensibility. What exquisite

pieces they are, especially the Passacaglia . . . "Hier tropft Schnee leise in

Wasserlachen. . ."


of 1912 was also wonderfully rich and even more protean,

though it could be considered something of a decline in

originality and explosive force, at least from he Sacre and

Pierrot Webern's songs with instruments belong to this

period, and so does Wozzeck, and Schoenberg's Serenade

and Five Pieces, op. 23, and my own Renard, Noces, Soldat,

and the Symphonies of Wind Instruments. This is still the

period of exploration and discovery, however. Your so-

called period of formulation came only in the later 1920s,

with the establishment of so-called "neoclassicism"

—Schoenberg's, Hindemith's, and my own. During the fif-

teen years from 1930 to 1945, however, these three "neo-

classic" schools were ascendant, and the fact that they can

be called schools is already an indication of the onset of

formulae. The Schoenberg, or, as it is now called, the)

dodecaphonic school, for all its great merits, was obsessed

by an artificial need to abnegate any suggestion of triadic

"tonality"—a very difficult thing to do. And, curiously, its

music was heavily founded in the most turgid and grace-

less Brahms.

As for my imitators, my "school" if you prefer, their A

trouble was that they imitated not so much my music as

my person in my music. They were noted for their rhythms,

their ostinatos, their "unexpected" accents, their diatonic

"lines," their "dissonances," and for their final C-major

chords with B natural or A in them. The characteristics a

of the Hindemith school were its interminable 9/8 move-

Since I have already expressed my reservations about Jeux—I consider the

musical substance too poor for the musical working-out—perhaps I

should now say why I value it. Jeux discovers a whole new world of nuanceand fluidity. These qualities are French, even peculiarly French, perhaps,

but they are new. The work's influence on Boulez is therefore natural ( andnatural too is its lack of influence on me, for its free-beat, loose bar lines

are worlds apart from my rarely rubato, strong bar-line music). I wouldstill call Jeux "decadent," though I mean that only in relation to my owndevelopment

Il8 MEMORIES AND COMMENTARIES

ments, its endless fourths, and its fugues with subjects at

least thirty-two bars long. Other schools existed, of course

—the Broadway, the Appalachian, the Neo-Neanderthal

(Orff), the arriere-garde, etc., but these three were princi-

pal and paramount.

All three schools had come to a stalemate, however,

when at the end of the war in 1945 a new period of ex-

ploration and revolution began precisely with the redis-

covery of the masterpieces of 1912, and the music of

Webern in general. Boulez's cantatas are representative of

this new music of the immediate postwar. They derive

from the Webern cantatas in substance and style but are

more complex in texture. ( In fact, with them the ideal of a

thin, neoclassic line disappears.) In this new period of

exploration the only significant work so far is still Boulez's

he Marteau sans Maitre (1954).

The next work in this succession, it is already apparent,

must utilize musico-electronic means, exploit acoustical

mirror effects, and mix composed with improvised ele-

ments. But enough of soothsaying: I am a composer my-

self, and I must cultivate my own garden.

STEREOPHONY

R.C. What does stereophony mean to you, both as com-

poser and performer, and would you comment on the use

of it in present recording technique?

/.S. Our two ears are about six inches apart, whereas the

stereo microphones which hear a live orchestra for us are

sometimes as much apart as sixty feet. We do not hear

live performances stereophonically, therefore, and stereo

—instead of giving us "the best seat in the house"—is, in

fact, a kind of nonexistent, omnipresent seat. ( Nor is it a

seat in the orchestra, for an orchestra doesn't sound stereo-

SOME MUSICAL QUESTIONS lig

phonic to itself.) I say this not to criticize stereo, how-

ever, but to question the meaning of "high fidelity."

Fidelity to what? But though stereo may be unreal in mysense, it can be in another sense ideal, and as such it has

important consequences. For one thing, it is a challenge

to existing concert halls: how can we continue to prefer

an inferior reality (the concert hall) to ideal stereophony?

The stereo principle that the distance between the

speakers is the "microphone," instead of the microphone

itself, is still too imperfectly demonstrated by most record-

ings I have heard, where I have been more conscious of

the switch from one speaker to another than of the space

between. This Ping-pong effect in certain kinds of music-

Wagner's, for example—can be a disturbing distortion in-

deed. Wagner's musical-acoustical idea in Bayreuth was

to fuse the orchestra, to bring it as close together as possi-

ble. Stereophonic separation, with its illusion of orchestral

space, is therefore quite alien to his musical intentions.

But any purely harmonic music—music that depends on

fusion and balance—will suffer from too much focus on its

individual parts. In principle, of course, stereophonic

recording should be able to fuse and balance, but in prac-

tice we often feel as though we are being made to follow

the equivalent of an "Arrow" score—that is, to jump to

the violins on their entrance, or swerve in an acoustical

spotlight toward the trombones on theirs.

On the other hand, distortion of this sort does not ruin

certain kinds of polyphonic music, for the very reason that

this music is poly-phonic, i.e., can be heard from different

aural perspectives. Some polyphonic music does not de-

pend on round harmonic balances, and we are even grate-

ful when bits of interior construction are suddenly ex-

posed, or when details of part writing are brought into

relief.


Stereophony also enables us to hear the true effect of

many kinds of "rear stereophonic music, Mozart's Not-

turno for Four Orchestras, for example, or the cori spez-

zati of the Venetians, music in which the stereophony has

been composed rather than engineered. I would also in-

clude in this category most of Webem, for a work like

his Variations for Orchestra, op. 30, seems to me to exploit

the "distance factor" and to anticipate the new stereo-

phonic idea.

Stereophony has already influenced composed music

too. At one level this amounts to the exploitation of the

stereo effect ( the stereo fault, rather ) by ''building" it "in,"

i.e., creating distance and separation by reseating the or-

chestra, etc. (When I listen to this sort of music, I find

myself looking in the direction of the sound, as I do in

Cinerama; "direction" therefore seems to me as good a

word as "distance" to describe the stereo effect.) Stock-

hausen's Gruppen and Boulez's Doubles are examples of

this influence. At another level, composers will soon come

to see that stereo obliges them to construct a more interest-

ing "middle dimension" in their music.

I cannot contribute very much on the subject of present

stereophonic recording techniques, but I do know some-

thing about the difficulties conductors experience in satis-

fying the demands of stereo microphones during recording

sessions. Stereophonic separation used to require a sepa-

ration of orchestral and choral performers, and the various

groups of separated instrumentalists and singers are some-

times greatly handicapped in hearing each other; also, solo

singers or groups of singers, or perhaps an especially

resonant drum, must sometimes be isolated by panels,

which makes ensemble playing almost impossible.

In spite of all my reservations about stereo, however, I

expect that when I am accustomed to it—to its much

Sketch for the cover

of my Ragtime,

by Picasso, 1919.

Cocteau, Picasso,

myself, Olga Picasso,

Antibes, 1926.

I,

r;

*> %

4 V

J 1 i • f\

V w\ a \ / *

f

j

A

^My drawing of Robert Craft,

with a bar of Les Nocessounding in his ear, March,1949.

Diaghilev, drawn by me, 1921.

i r i

Madrid, 1921. Left to right, Robert Delaunay, Boris Kochno, myself, SomaDelaunay, Diaghilev, Manuel de Falla, Barocchi (the husband of Lopokova).

/ith Charles Chaplin,

lollywood, 1937.

hotographs by King Vidor,

ourtesy of Life magazine.)

First orchestra rehearsal of The Rake's Progress, La Scala,

September, 1951. Robert Craft, Chester Kallman, W. H. Auden,and a musician.

With Madame Stravinsky, Bologna, 1959.


greater volume and dynamic range, to its really remarka-

ble ability to clarify orchestral doublings (which were

probably better left in the dark), to its ability to create

the distance between a close instrument and a faraway

instrument—I know I shall soon be unable to listen to any-

thing else.

TRADITION

St. Paul: "Thou bearest not the

root, but the root thee."

R.C. Do you have a special theory of, or meaning for,

tradition?

LS. No, I am merely very prudent with the word, for it

now seems to imply "that which resembles the past"—the

reason, incidentally, why no good artist is very happy when

his work is described as "traditional." In fact, the true

tradition-making work may not resemble the past at all,

and especially not the immediate past, which is the only

one most people are able to hear. Tradition is generic; it

is not simply "handed down," fathers to sons, but under-

goes a life process: it is born, grows, matures, declines, and

is reborn, perhaps. These stages of growth and regrowth

are always in contradiction to the stages of another con-

cept or interpretation: true tradition lives in the contra-

diction. Notre heritage nest precede d'aucun testament

(Our heritage was left to us by no will), (Rene Char).

This is, I think, "true." At the same time, however, the

artist feels his "heritage" as the grip of a very strong pair

of pincers.

Three Operas

I. THE NIGHTINGALE

ITS PREMIERE

R.C. Your Autobiography contains very little information

about the premiere of The Nightingale, nor do other

sources describe the event more fully—which is curious,

if only because The Nightingale followed the so-sensa-

tional Sacre du Printemps. What do you remember of the

performance and its reception, and why was the produc-

tion so quickly eclipsed?

I.S. To answer the second question first, The Nightingale

was introduced only a few weeks before the 1914 war, and

during the war the Diaghilev company was too reduced

in means to mount anything as complicated as an opera

that for only forty-five minutes' playing time required

three sets and many costly costumes. The "eclipse," as

you call it, must be attributed to budgetary rather than

artistic reasons. 1 The present neglect of The Nightingale

is in part due to the fact that it must be performed in a

double bill, and suitable companion pieces have been

1 Since these remarks were made, I have conducted The Nightingale in

Los Angeles. I now find that Act I, in spite of its very evident

Debussyisms, vocalises a la Lakm4, and Tchaikovsky melodies too sweet

and too cute even for that date, is at least operatic, whereas the later acts

are a kind of opera-pageant ballet I can only attribute the musical style of

the later acts—the augmented seconds, parallel intervals, pentatonic tunes,

orchestral devices ( tremolos, muted brass, cadenzas, etc. ) to the great

difficulty I experienced in returning to the opera at all after five years, and

especially after Le Sacre du Printemps.


difficult to find (when I conducted it myself at La Scala

in the 1920s—a performance efficiently prepared by Tosca-

nini, incidentally—the other half of the bill was . . .

Hansel and Gretell). Diaghilev programed it with ballets,

however; and with Petroushka, especially, it went very

well. Diaghilev always wanted to stage opera as he had

staged The Nightingale—that is, as opera-ballet, with

dancers miming the sung roles, while the singers them-

selves were nicely out of sight in the orchestra pit.

The premiere was unsuccessful only in the sense that it

failed to create a scandal. Musically and visually, the

performance was excellent. Monteux conducted capably.

The singers, particularly "Death," and the "Nightingale,"

were good. And, scenically, thanks to Alexander Benois,

who designed the costumes and sets, it was the most

beautiful of all my early Diaghilev works. Boris Romanov

composed the dances, and Alexander Sanin was the

metteur en seine. The opera was sung in Russian; and

that is all I remember about the premiere.

As to its reception, the "advanced" musicians were

genuinely enthusiastic—or so I thought. That Ravel liked

it, I am certain, but I am almost as convinced that Debussy

did not, for I heard nothing whatever from him about it.

I remember this well, for I expected him to question meabout the great difference between the music of Act I

and the later acts, and though I knew he would have liked

the Moussorgsky-Debussy beginning, he probably would

have said about that, too, "Young man, I do it better." Onmy last trip to Russia I remember reading a remark in

my diary—I kept a diary from 1906 to 19102—written when

2 Left in a steel safe which was part of my grandfather's Biedermeier

desk, a piece of furniture which might still be in our house in Oustiloug

—

together with my manuscripts and letters. Incidentally, all my music before

Petroushka was written at this desk.

THREE OPERAS I25

I was composing the first act of The Nightingale: "Whyshould I be following Debussy so closely, when the real

originator of this operatic style was Moussorgsky?" But, in

justice to Debussy, I must own that I saw him only very

infrequently in the weeks after The Nightingale, and

perhaps he simply had no opportunity to tell me his true

impressions.

The Nightingale was staged in a great hurry. In fact, I

was still composing the music only a few months before

the premiere. The London performances were probably

better than the Parisian, because the singers and dancers

would have had more time with their parts. I immensely

enjoyed them, at any rate, thanks also to the generosity of

Sir Thomas Beecham.3I should record the fact, too, that

at the outbreak of war Beecham helped me with a payment

of money which enabled my mother to return to Russia

from Switzerland (by boat from Brindisi to Odessa).

But rather than attempt to describe the staging of the

original Nightingale, I will publish Alexander Benois's

letters to me covering that period. Benois was in Russia

and I in Switzerland during the latter stages of the opera's

planning and composition. My wife was ill with tubercu-

losis, and we moved to Leysin—to be near the sanatorium.

I could not meet Benois, therefore, which was a misfortune,

though it produced these letters. Benois was the conserva-

tive of the company, and Diaghilev tended to favor

Roerich, not Benois, as The Nightingale's designer. I had

great respect for Benois, however, and insisted that he

3 I think it was on this trip, though it may have been the year before,

that I met Frederick Delius. He had come to Covent Garden to attend a

performance of our Ballet. Beecham introduced him to me, and he paid mecompliments for Petroushka, but, as I spoke almost no English, and he but

litde French, the conversation did not develop. He was in a wheel chair,

and looked ghostly. Thirty-seven years later I visited his famous orange

farm, D. H. Lawrence's would-have-been Utopia, in Florida.


decorate my opera. Benois's ideas were followed, and his

suggestions in the fourth letter are, in fact, an exact "in

color" account of the actual staging.

September, 1913

St. Petersburg

Dear Igor Feodorovitch,

My dear friend, how sad that we are living so far apart. It seems

to me that we could do great things together! But this way noth-

ing will happen. And all the others are dispersed, too. Serge is

the Devil knows where. After discussing the Bach ballet with mein Baden, he was to have come to see me in Lugano and to have

brought Ravel with him. But I have heard nothing from him,

and since he has disappeared without a note, I am inclined to

believe those charming gossipers (their news has probably

reached you too) who say that Vaslav married a Hungarian

millionairess and Serge, in his grief, has sold the company to an

impresario. Have you any news of our dissolute genius Serge?

Valetchka,4 who went to Paris (cursing his fate, poor fellow),

also does not know anything.

Besides the staging of the Goldoni I must also start to prepare

The Possessed5 for the spring season, and all this in addition to

writing my History of Painting. I am passionately interested in

The Nightingale. When do you think it will be ready for its run?

I do not give up hope of doing it myself. It would be a creative

aphrodisiac for me. I believe that Roerich would achieve some-

thing miraculous with it, but some details Roerich would prob-

ably not do, and just these details would interest me enor-

mously.

My dear friend, write to me again, and soon. I promise to an-

swer without delay, and if you want some information I will be

glad to help you. I embrace you and I kiss the hand of dear

4 Walter Nouvel.

5 A dramatic version of the novel of Dostoievsky.

THREE OPERAS 127

Catherina Gabrielovna, to whom my wife sends her most cordial

greetings.

Your loving Alexander Benois

St Petersburg

28th September 1913

Dear Igor Feodorovitch, I was in Moscow and found your letter

only on my return. The news about Nijinsky's marriage struck

me like a thunderbolt. When did it happen? None of our friends

is here in town at the moment, and I know of no one who can

give me any information about it, since I do not want to talk to a

stranger like Svetlov.6 I saw Serge and Vaslav almost on the

eve of Vaslav's departure for Argentina, and there was no hint

then about the coming event. Nijinsky was very attentively

studying Bach with us, preparing the Bach ballet. It is possible

that he had no idea of it then? Be kind and tell me one thing:

was it a complete surprise for Serge, or was he prepared for it?

How deep was his shock?7 Their romance was coming to an

end, and I doubt that he was reaDy heartbroken, but if he did

suffer I hope it was not too terrible for him. However, I imagine

he must be completely bewildered in his position as head of the

company. But why can't Nijinsky be both a ballet master and a

Hungarian millionaire?8 The whole story is such a phantasma-

goria I sometimes think I have read it in a dream and am an

idiot to believe it.

I am sorry to be unable to fulfill your request completely, but

listen why: the two theaters have become rivals, and all connec-

tions between them are broken. The gossip I hear about it has

been contradictory and I do not know what to believe. Somepeople say everything in the Free Theater is perfect: that there

is plenty of money; that each invention is more amusing and

6 A well-known balletomane.

7 I had been with Diaghilev in the Montreux Palace Hotel when the

news of Nijinsky's marriage came, and I had watched him turn into a

madman who begged me and my wife not to leave him alone.

8 Benois evidently thought Nijinsky had married an Hungarian heiress.


ingenious than the one before; that two of the subscription

nights are already sold out (this, it seems, is true), etc., etc. . . .

Some people are delighted by Mardjanov, but others say he is

impossible, etc., etc. I personally think that, in any case, it will

last at least two years and that they will be able to stage TheNightingale,9 but I would not promise it absolutely. I think also

that they will do a mixture, some interesting things and muchmerde. The Moscow public will swallow it all, good and bad

alike, of course, since Moscow knows no better and will devour

anything. I am very impatient for the opening, however, be-

cause a venture as naive as that must at least result in something

refreshing.

I am longing for The Nightingale, especially after seeing

Mitusov, who gave me his impressions after Warsaw.10

I embrace you. As soon as I have something more definite I will

write you. I kiss Catherina Gabrielovna's hand and send you

best wishes.

With love, Alexander Benois

St. Petersburg

ist January 1Q14

Dear Igor Feodorovitch, I write in a hurry as I am just leaving

for Moscow. For the last two hours I have looked everywhere

for your letter with the description of the sets ( and the enumera-

tion of the characters), and cannot find it. I could start to study

the play and just now comes this delay. I beg you, send me im-

mediately a second copy, and also a detailed libretto. I beg you

not to insist on the colors. I have my own ideas, and I think the

result will be good. The hall in the castle will be pink with dark

blue and black. But, my God, where is the music? Is it possible

9 The Nightingale was produced at the Imperial Theatre in "Petrograd,"

January 1916, staged by Myerhold and decorated by Golovine.

10 1 had been with Mitusov in Warsaw to discuss The Nightingale

libretto. I was on my way from Russia to Switzerland, where I finished the

composition of the opera.

THREE OPERAS 120,

that I will have to work without this main source of inspiration

and without your personal promptings?

Goodness, the train! 1! I embrace you cordially,

Your Alexander Benois

P.S. Write to me c/o Moscow Art Theater, Kammergersky

Drive. Come!

Moscow15th February 1Q14

Dear Igor Feodorovitch, Although your so-obstinate silence

shows that you do not wish to talk to me at all, I am obliged to

bother you to clarify a few points. (I flatter myself, however,

and hope that the real reason for your silence is not a change of

your feelings toward me, but circumstances which have envel-

oped you as much as they have me.

)

The hall of the Emperor will be white with blue. 11 On the other

hand, there will be a lot 01 pink and green in the costumes. But

what keeps me from finishing the sketch of this setting and of

the set in this tableau in general, is this: what am I to do with

the procession? You wanted a palanquin and you wanted the

Emperor "inserted" in the throne. 12 A marvelous ideal But howdo you visualize the following combination: the throne is

carried by a whole crowd of people, including eight small chil-

dren; the throne is put on a scaffold, and then the Emperor

appears, surrounded closely by dignitaries who hold five par-

asols above Him! You wanted a palanquin, but every procession

has one, and this is new.

In general, I am constructing the procession as follows:

seven female dancers dressed in gold;

seven female dancers dressed in silver;

one male dancer and one female dancer very luxuriously

11 Sic. See Letter 3.

12 My idea was to have the Emperor fixed on his throne like a doll.


costumed, and with them three dancers, monsters, and two

white boys with swords, and five black boys with swords;

all this party participating in a symbolic pantomime.

After this comes the court (the chorus is already on the stage)

:

first appear two white-costumed mandarins;

then—two gray-costumed mandarins;

then—a totally black Grand Master of the Court;

then—the Chief Chamberlain with the Nightingale.

Then comes the throne, and finally, His Majesty, whom no-

body could see until this moment because of the parasols

hiding him.

The procession closes with two guards who take a standing

position at the foot of the throne. ( The same land of guards

can walk in front, or be ready on the stage in the beginning.

)

Do you see now what I mean? But perhaps you want something

quite different. The final word is with you, but for God's sake,

send me this word immediately, or everything will go to hell.

Until I have your exact instructions I shall not start the defini-

tive work.

Perhaps an even more important question concerns the last act.

How do you see it yourself? And, first of all, I beg you to send

me the details of the staging immediately, and the libretto itself,

which I ask you to mark with the basic tempi. This is supremely

important (the music will explain what I shall not understand

in the text). I would prefer to have the piano score, but prob-

ably it is far from finished.

How can we see each other to discuss all this? I wanted to

come to Berlin for a meeting, but now it is simply impossible.

Think only how many days will be wasted, and just now, whenevery hour is precious. Is it absolutely impossible for you to

come here?

Now, about the decor of the third act. I imagine it like this:

in front is a kind of antechamber, separated from the bedroom

by a big curtain (covering the whole stage: red, yellow, gold,

and black). This curtain is first drawn back and we see a majes-

tic bedroom at night and in moonlight. The curtains are then

THREE OPERAS 131

closed and at the end, again opened for us to see, a Sacrum

Cubiculum in all its splendor (many windows, a gigantic bed,

etc.). What do you think of it? Perhaps you have conceived it

quite differently? I implore you to answer.

I kiss Catherina Gabrielovna's hand and wish with all myheart happiness for the newborn baby,13 the mother, and the

happy father. I am burning with impatience to embrace you.

One of these days I expect to hear Koussevitsky conduct heSacre du Printemps.

I embrace you, Alexander Benois

P.S. Write me to St. Petersburg, 31, Admirals' Canal, and on

the envelope write, "In case of absence please forward the letter

immediately." But the best thing to do, my dear, would be to

answer the main points by telegram. If you are in agreement

with all: "Approuve tout"; if not, then in a few words: "Emperor

en palanquin*; "Trdne en scene," etc. Something of this kind.

For God's sake, hurry with an answer.

St. Petersburg

l/fth-ijth February 1Q14

Dear Igor Feodorovitch, I am in a great rush, for which reason

I will limit myself to business and avoid speaking about myartistic feelings.

It is already a whole week that I have been living with the

sounds of he Sacre du Printemps in my ears. It started in Mos-cow and continues now in St. Petersburg. I am longing to hear

it again, and am sad when I think that for a long time I shall beunable to hear this music, about which I cannot even say if it is

good or great, because I am still completely bewildered by it.

Nor do I know if Koussevitsky conducted it correctly. However,we have our impressions of it.

The success, alas, was rather big, in spite of the hundredpeople who walked out after the first part. I say "alas" because

the audience applauded in advance, in defiance of Paris, and

13 My daughter, Maria Milena.


also because that audience applauds Bach, Beethoven, Wagner,

Rachmaninov, and Stravinsky all equally. (Do not carry your

head too high, and do not draw conclusions, but I love the first

of these names and very much dislike most of the others. ) Asuccess with such an audience is nauseating. I am very glad that

Nurok liked it, however; and that the Rimsky-Korsakov clan

hissed it violently is also a consolation.

I babble too much. Business! Business! My dear, what about

the following combination: in the beginning, a huge bedroom

with a few windows flooded by moonlight; ghosts ( Serge does

not want ghosts, but why not have them sitting on the bed or

showing their ugly faces through the curtain of the bed—I do

not yet know myself exactly how to do it ); a bed with a canopy;

a catafalque through which Death leaves (not through the

window; the catafalque must melt in front of you—is such a trick

possible?). Day breaks during the Nightingale's song. Then,

with the bird's last notes, the courtiers, thinking the Emperordead, ceremoniously close the curtains (the courtiers walk

onstage, single file).

The next scene, the court, is in front of the stage curtain, so

that when the curtain goes up the bedroom can be flooded bysunlight for the Emperors "Bonjour & tous." Apropos this finale,

I thought the ending of the Sacre perhaps too abrupt—lackingin the feeling of finality. People who saw the stage performance

say that it is even more noticeable there. I am afraid such a thing

can happen again; but, of course, you must know better. Do not

listen to that monster Serge, who has a mania to cut and will cut

until nothing is left. I await your confirmation of the plans, or

any changes that have to be made.

The set for the second tableau is already done, and whether

it is good or bad, I cannot say because I have no time to look at it

again.

Anna Karlovna14 had a sore throat and could not be present at

the Sacre. She sends you and dear Catherina Gabrielovna,

whom we both love with all our hearts, our greetings and best

wishes*

Devotedly yours, Alexander Benois

14 His wife.

THREE OPERAS 133

P.S. My family all praise The Nightingale sets, but how can

one believe one's family?

P.P.S. I know nothing about the Free Theater beyond what

has been written in the newspapers. I hear, however, that

Mardjanov found another idiot willing to give money and that

he wants to ruin this new idiot by introducing spectacles of

dramatic action.

Sanin will stay with Suhodolsky and will stage operettas,

probably. Since I came back from Moscow, where I did the

decors and sets for Goldom s Tavern Keeper, I am so deep in

The Nightingale, I have no time to read or to learn anything. I

see no one, and I have had no conversation with anybody.

I embrace you devotedly, dear Igor Feodorovitch, and again

wish you everything that is good. And, once more, please give

my greetings to your charming wife.

6

St.-Jean-de-Luz

Hotel de la Porte

23rd July 1914

My dear friend, your letter puzzled me so much I have gone

around composing answers to it for the last five days, but I can-

not manage a single one. I really do not like Kozma Prootkov,15

or rather, I do not understand the gigantic importance he

assumes in Russian literature and in Russian life. KozmaProotkov is funny, foolish, clever, and from time to time ex-

tremely talented, but the book never shows a really strong sense

of humor, or the real art of laughter of Gogol and Dostoievsky.

At any rate, I do not see real wit in Prootkov's too long and

naive—in the bad sense—salad of parody. So, in my opinion, it is

not worth while spending time on Prootkov, and I think it would

be better to forget this "manual for Russian schoolboys," this

15 Under this imaginary name, three well-known Russian poets of the

1860s, Alexei Tolstoy and the brothers Jemchooshnikov, wrote a book of

humorous and nonsensical verse that was very popular in Tsarist Russia. I

had proposed a collaboration with Benois to make a comic piece for the

theater, a kind of Renard, to some verses and a little play from KozmaProotkov.


copybook for our Satirikon and Boodilnik. 16 Laughter must be

different now, funnier and more terrible. Nevertheless, I read

the book from the first page to the last (by the way, I thank you

for it, because it gave me great pleasure). Your rapture over it

perplexed me and I wished with all my heart to feel the same.

Alas, this did not happen, and I was left a cold fish. I decided to

be frank and to tell you the truth, but my truth is not absolute,

and I would be unhappy indeed if my opinion were to discon-

cert you. Perhaps you find something where I see only empti-

ness. If so, start work. Though I hold to my opinion, I am sure

that Kozma Prootkov as seen by Stravinsky will start to live a

new and wonderful life. Also, I am sure that listening to your

music—(and I believe in every note) I shall be able to catch

your feelings and create something worthy of your music—or,

at least, something that will not spoil it. But perhaps you should

choose another painter, for instance, Sudeikine, who is under-

rated and who, more swiftly than I, will find response in his

soul to what Jemchooshnikov and Tolstoy fabricated.

My dear, I am very worried about the impression this "cold-

water" letter will make on you and your muse, but cold water is

not so bad if it comes at the proper time and if you have a towel

handy. If my douche was mistimed and you catch cold, please

forgive me, dear.

With love and kisses for you both, Alexander Benois

16 Russian humorous magazines.

II. PERSEPHONE

R.C. Your Autobiography did not reveal the circum-

stances of your collaboration with Andre Gide. To what

extent was Persephone in fact a collaboration? And, as

Gide was one of your first acquaintances in Paris, would

you describe him as you knew him?

I.S. Gide is a complicated subject in any case, and he was

not less so personally. He had to be prised open, like an

oyster, and the priser had to remember not to put his

fingers in the wrong place, for, like an oyster, he could

bite. If I were to hear someone else describe him I think

I could comment on the accuracy of the description, but

for me to talk about such a man myself is difficult indeed.

We met for the first time in 1910, in Misia Sert's rooms at

the Hotel Meurice. I knew him by reputation, of course:

he was already an established writer, though his fame was

to come much later. After that I saw him from time to time

at Ballet rehearsals. Whether he came to those of he Sacre

du Printemps, however, I do not know. (But I was too

busy with he Sacre to be aware of anyone besides Debussy

and Ravel, who were not then on speaking terms and who

sat on opposite sides of the house; I took my place directly

behind Monteux to avoid a show of partiality for either

of the feuding composers. Debussy, incidentally, was very

amiable about he Sacre at the rehearsals, which made his

later, negative attitude all the more surprising.

)


Some months after he Sacre, Gide approached me with

a project to compose incidental music for his translation of

Antony and Cleopatra. I replied that the musical style

would depend on the style of the whole production, but

Gide did not understand what I meant. Later, when I

suggested that the production be in modern dress, he was

shocked—and deaf to my arguments that we would be

nearer Shakespeare by inventing something new, and

nearer him in every way than he was, veristically, to An-

tony and Cleopatra. I still believe, by the way, that the

music in Shakespeare's plays should be Shakespearean,

i.e., period music, and that even Purceirs Shakespearean

pieces should be performed only with a style of production

appropriate to PurcelTs period; and, of course, "mod-

ern" music is justified only in "modern" versions of the

plays. (Sound effects—electronic music—are something

apart; I am talking about musical style.

)

As for Persephone, I hardly think it can be called a

collaboration. The only parts of the libretto we had ac-

tually worked on together were the children's choruses; I

wished to repeat the music here and asked Gide to compose

additional verses (as, later, I was to ask Auden for a

second set of choruses in Act I, scene 2, of the Rake).

His Persephone was an early work and quite unknown

to me. Mme. Ida Rubinstein had asked me to read it

and to meet Gide to discuss the possibility of a collabora-

tion based upon it. A dance-mime role would have to be

created for her, of course, but we understood that to be

the only stipulation. ( Mme. Rubinstein was an actress and

a woman of great wealth. I had known her since my arrival

in Paris in 1910, and I attended the first performance of

Debussy's Le Martyre de St. SSbastien with her and

d'Annunzio, in her box. She was also an "original," as

she proved already in her eighteenth year by hiring a

THREE OPERAS 137

private train to take her from St. Petersburg to Moscow.

She had commissioned Bakst to arrange the flower beds

of her Paris garden so that all the flowers were in trays

and the whole garden could be changed every few weeks.

I often saw Gide at her Paris home. ) Gide came to Wies-

baden to see me in 1933. We read his original Persephone

together and decided at once on the device of the speaker

and on the three-part form. Gide reconstructed and re-

wrote the original book after this meeting.

These are some of the letters I received from Gide during

our "collaboration."

1 bis rue Vaneau

Pans VII

20th January ig^3

My dear friend, Ida Rubinstein has asked me to write to you.

She has been seduced by an idea, which I have just submitted

to her, for a symphonic ballet. She says that if it seduces you

also, you will agree to work with me for her. The thought of

attaching my name to your name in a work that has been close

to my heart for a very long time fills me with extreme pride and

joy. A word from you would call me to Berlin or elsewhere to

talk to you about it—and the sooner the better. I will dine Mon-day the 23rd at Ida's with Sert, who is very enthusiastic and whowould like to do the settings. I could join you Wednesday. It

does not matter where.

A word from you or a telegram to Ida Rubinstein or to mewould tell us where to telephone you Monday evening betweennine and ten o'clock (dont forget the difference in time, andwhat is the number?).

This moment Ida Rubinstein telephones me to say that youexpect to reach the south of France soon, where I could then

join you. And perhaps you will come through Paris, whichwould save my coming to Berlin.

Amicalement, and full of hope, Andre Gide


8th February 2933

My dear friend,

First of all, let me tell you of the excellent impressions I have

brought back with me from our meeting in Wiesbaden. I told

Mme. Rubinstein that our understanding was perfect. Without

exaggeration, I am sure that we will find in her our best support

in the struggle with even the most exacting designer, whoever

he may be. She is extremely pleased with what I told her about

the way in which you understood the subject as the celebration

of a mystery, and that you want to remove from the libretto

what I was at first tempted to put in: episodic bits—as though

for a kind of divertissement. I am now working in this direction.

I will send you an edition of the Odyssey ( in translation ) that

contains the Homeric hymns. It is the last of these hymns (to

Demeter) which inspired me, and I do not doubt that you will

find in it the same extraordinary exaltation which I found my-

self when I read it the first time. All my efforts will be toward

maintaining the nobility of this exaltation throughout my text.

As you will feel for yourself, the subject itself is halfway be-

tween a natural interpretation (the rhythm of the seasons; the

corn falling in the soil must die to be resurrected through the

sleep of winter ) and a mystical interpretation; this way the myth

is connected at the same time with both the ancient Egyptian

cults and Christian doctrine.

I was much moved by what you said to me in Wiesbaden:

that it will be interesting to mark and to fix the change of sea-

sons, and the feeling of the seasonal cycle is indispensable to

our melodrama. But this idea of starting with the Autumn(however seductive it may be as an idea for beginning the

descent of Proserpina into Hell) cannot be maintained. It

would be cheating the Greek myth too outrageously, and you

will see why when you read the Hymn to Demeter. Proserpina

has nothing to do with Autumn. ( Besides, the Greek year had

only three seasons.) She is the purest personification of the

Spring.

THREE OPERAS 139

The plan of the first scene will follow in two days. It consists

of recitation, dances, and songs. Mme. Rubinstein says it is

impossible for the chorus to dance or for the dancing nymphs

to sing. Therefore, it will probably be necessary to place the

chorus in the orchestra pit or to one side of the stage front:

this will have to be studied. What is most important to meis to know, after my plan, how much time this first scene will

take.

Very attentively and cordially yours, Andre Gede

Var

Grand Hotel

Le Lavandou

24th February 1033

My dear Igor, This short note to welcome your return to

Voreppe, which you said would be on the 25th. I am working

"like a dog" for you. By now you should have received the sketch

of the first scene. I consider the text as definitive only in so far as

it suits you. The same with the second scene, which I gave to be

typed today and which you will receive very soon ( in one or two

days).

The part of the speaker (Eumolpus, the founder and first

officiating priest of the Eleusinian mysteries ) should be played

by a baritone, the part of Pluto by a bass, the bass-est bass pos-

sible, and the chorus by women s voices only. As you will see, I

decided, at your invitation, to exclude everything anecdotal.

Even the character of Eurydice. I fear that this scene ( the meet-

ing with Eurydice), completely episodic as it is, will make it too

long. I could add this scene, however, if the text seems to you

too short for the musical development, as it now seems to me.

Mme. Rubinstein seems to be very pleased. I want you to be

pleased, too, and I will listen with attention to all your criti-

cisms, remarks, suggestions, etc.

Wishing you fruitful work, I am, full of hope and expectations,

Very affectionately yours, Andre Gide

I40 MEMORIES AND COMMENTARIES

1 bis rue Vaneau

Paris VII

8th August 1Q33

My dear Igor, Excuse this delay. I found your letter yesterday

evening coming back from a small trip in Belgium.

Encore is written (in poetry) either with or without the final

e, depending on the requirements of the rhythm and the rhyme.

I propose—ad libitum—for the second verse: Parle encor Parle

encor, princesse Persdphone, which is better than my previous

proposal.

Parle-nous, parle-nous encor Persephone

is perfectly possible without "e" (and so would satisfy your

wish for two syllables ) , but the verse would have only eleven

feet because we do not count the final syllable as a foot if it is

a silentue.*

It seems to me that according to the musical indication you

gave me, Parle encor Parle encor, princesse Persephone would

work perfectly.

Happy to know you are working well. I shake your hand.

Amicalement, Andre Gide

There are at least two explanations for Gide's dislike of

my Persephone music. One is that the musical accentua-

tion of the text surprised and displeased him, though he

had been warned in advance that I would stretch and

stress and otherwise "treat'*1 French as I had Russian, and

though he understood my ideal texts to be syllable poems,

the haiku of Basho and Buson, for example, in which the

1 1 will admit, however, that my habits of musical accentuation have

misled meaning in at least one instance. The line Ego senem cecidi in

Oedipus Rex accented on the ce, as I have it, means, "I fell the old man,"

whereas it should be accented Ego senem cecidi and mean, "I killed the old

man." This can be corrected in performance, but remains awkward.

THREE OPERAS 141

words do not impose strong tonic accentuation of their

own.2 The other explanation is simply that he could not

follow my musical speech. When I first played the music

to him at Ida Rubinstein's all he would say was, "Cest

curieux, cest trds curieux," and disappear as soon after-

ward as possible. He did not attend the rehearsals, and if

he was present at any of the performances, J did not see

him. A play of his was then being staged in the Petit

Theatre Des Champs-Elysees, but this shouldn't have pre-

vented him from hearing at least one performance of

Persephone. Shortly after the premiere he sent me a copy

of the newly published libretto with the dedication "In

coinmunion." I answered that "communion" was exactly

what we had not had; his last letter to me is in reply to that.

1 bis rue Vaneau

28th May 1Q34My dear Stravinsky,

I hope, nonetheless, you will not put in doubt my affection for

you and my admiration for your work, because I did not attend

the rehearsals of your, of our, Persephone! Or do you harbor

some other grievance against me that I do not know of?

As I have no grievance of any kind against you, I will continue

in my ardent friendship for you.

Andre Gide

We did not meet again after Persephone, but I do not

think we were really angry with each other even then. In-

deed, how could I be angry for long with a man of so

much honesty?

2 Since making these remarks I have witnessed an instance of wordtreatment similar to my own in the Kanjincho play (Kabuki Theater).

Here, in the famous catechism scene between Togashi and Benkei, a verse

dialogue I did not have to understand to enjoy as music, the verbs are syn-

copated, I am told, held over the bar lines, so to speak, and the syllables

grouped into rhythmic quantities that tend to obscure sense.


If I could distinguish between Gide's talent and his

writing, it would be to proclaim a preference for the latter,

though the writing, too, is very often like eau distille. I

considered the Voyage au Congo the best of his books, but

I did not care for either the spirit or the approach in his

fiction: he was not grand enough as a creator to make us

forget the sins of his nature—as Tolstoy can make us forget

the sins of his nature. However, as he seldom talked about

his work my relations with him were smooth in this respect.

Though Gide was not a conspicuously loving critic, he

was at least inside the art he criticized. And his criticism

could and did illuminate. His limitation, I thought, was his

"reason": all he did or said had to be reasoned, with the

result that he lacked enthusiasm and could find no sym-

pathy for all the vast unreasonableness in man and art. "It

is better to reason," he would say, "than to make an en-

thusiastic mistake." That he had wit is evident from his

reply when asked to name the greatest French poet:

"Helas, Victor Hugo." And verbal precision such as he had

is always enviable; I would have esteemed him if only

for that. But he was at his best in company, with Valery, or

Claudel, or Ramuz, for then the conversation would always

revert to the French language, and on this subject he was

without peer.

Gide was fascinated by Pushkin, and he would some-

times call on me in my Paris apartment to talk to me about

the Russian poet, and indeed about everything Russian.

He called on me in Berlin, too, in October, 1931, an occa-

sion I also remember because of Hindemith's having

bravely bawled out the Berlin Radio Orchestra after its bad

playing of my new violin concerto. Apart from Pushkin and

Russia, his favorite conversational subject was religion. I

had returned to the Orthodox Church in 1926 ( I became a

communicant then for the first time since 1910 and com-

THREE OPERAS 143

posed my first religious work, an a cappella Pater Noster3)

and was not a good quarry for his proselytizing Protestant-

ism, but I have respected him for his views more than I

have some of the Catholic Pharisees who ridiculed him.

I do not know how to describe him in appearance. Hewas quite undistinguished, and he must have wished to

become even more so by dressing like a petit bourgeois.

And the one physical characteristic of his I can remember

is also negative. When he spoke, only his lips and mouth

moved: his body and the rest of his face remained per-

fectly immobile and expressionless. He also smiled a little

smile which I thought ironic and which may or may not

have been—though I thought it was—a sign of inner

torment. But if I had not known so much about Gide,

wouldn't I have been more open with him myself?

3 1 composed the Pater Noster and, later, an Ave Maria and a Credo,

for use in the Russian Orthodox Church. In accordance with liturgical

tradition and in view of the Eastern Church's fiat prohibiting the use of

musical instruments (even of a pitch pipe!), the music is a simple

harmonic intonation of the words. I heard the Pater Noster for the first

time in the Russian Church in the Rue Dam, Paris, by surprise, at the

funeral of a cousin. In 1949 I prepared a Latin version of all three

pieces, revising the Ave Maria somewhat in the process.

III. THE RAKE'S PROGRESS

R.C. How did you come to choose the "Rake's Progress" as

the subject and W. H. Auden as the librettist of your

opera? How much of the plot and how many of the charac-

ters, the scenes, and the sequences of musical numbers

were conceived and planned by you together with Auden?

What are your present thoughts about the style and con-

struction of the opera?

7.S. Hogarth's "Rake's Progress" paintings, which I saw in

1947 on a chance visit to the Chicago Art Institute, im-

mediately suggested a series of operatic scenes to me. I

was, however, readily susceptible to such a suggestion,

for I had wanted to compose an English-language opera

ever since my arrival in the United States. I chose Auden

on the recommendation of my good friend and neighbor

Aldous Huxley: at that time all I knew of his work was the

commentary for the film "Night Train." When I had de-

scribed to Huxley the kind of verse opera I wished to write,

he assured me Auden was the poet with whom I could

write it. Accordingly, in October, 1947, I wrote Auden,

telling him of my "Rake's Progress" idea. He replied as

follows:

THREE OPERAS 145

7 Cornelia Street

New York 14, N.Y.

12th October 1947

Dear Mr. Stravinsky,

Thank you very much for your letter of October 6th, which

arrived this morning.

As you say, it is a terrible nuisance being thousands of miles

apart, but we must do the best we can.

As (a) you have thought about the Rake's Progress for some

time, and (b) it is the librettist's job to satisfy the composer, not

the other way round, I should be most grateful if you could let

me have any ideas you may have formed about characters, plot,

etc.

I think the Asylum finale sounds excellent, but, for instance, if

he is to play the fiddle then, do you want the fiddle to run

through the story?

You speak of a "free verse preHminary.,, Do you want the arias

and ensembles to be finally written in free verse or only as a

basis for discussing the actual form they should take? If they

were spoken, the eighteenth-century style would of course de-

mand rhyme but I know how different this is when the words

are set.

I have an idea, which may be ridiculous, that between the two

acts, there should be a choric parabasis as in Aristophanes.

I need hardly say that the chance of working with you is the

greatest honor of my life.

Yours very sincerely, Wystan Auden

P. S. I hope you can read my writing. Unfortunately, I do not

know how to type.

I then invited him to come to my home in California,

where we could work together. On 24th October I received

the following telegram from him:

MANY THANKS FOR WIRE AND GENEROUS OFFER SHAME-

FACEDLY ACCEPTED SUGGEST LEAVING NEW YORK NOVEM-

BER TENTH IF CONVENIENT FOR YOU WYSTAN AUDEN

I46 MEMORIES AND COMMENTARIES

He arrived at night, carrying a small bag and a huge

cowskin rug, a gift for me from an Argentine friend. Mywife had been anxious that our only extra bed, a studio

couch, might not be long enough for him, but when we saw

this big, blond, intellectual bloodhound on our front porch

(before an hour had elapsed, however, we knew he was

going to be a very gentle and lovable bloodhound, how-

ever superintellectual) we realized that we hadn't been

anxious enough. He slept with his body on the couch and

his feet, covered by a blanket pinioned with books, on a

nearby chair, like the victim of a more humane and reason-

able Procrustes.

Early the next morning, primed by coffee and whisky,

we began work on The Rakes Progress. Starting with a

hero, a heroine, and a villain, and deciding that these

people should be a tenor, a soprano, and a bass, we pro-

ceeded to invent a series of scenes leading up to the final

scene in Bedlam that was already fixed in our minds. Wefollowed Hogarth closely at first and until our own story

began to assume a different significance.

Mother Goose and the Ugly Duchess were Auden's con-

tributions, of course, but the plot and the scheme of action

were worked out by the two of us together, step by step.

We also tried to co-ordinate the plan of action with a

provisional plan of musical pieces, arias, ensembles, and

choruses. Auden kept saying, "Let's see, now . . . ah-ah-

ah . . . let's see ... ah ... ah ... ," and I the equivalent

in Russian, but after ten days we had completed an outline

which is not radically different from the published li-

bretto.1

Auden fascinated and delighted me more every day.

When we were not working, he would explain verse forms

1 See Appendix.

THREE OPERAS 147

to me, and, almost as quickly as he could write, compose

examples—I still have a specimen sestina and some light

verse that he scribbled off for my wife-and any technical

question, of versification, for example, put him in a passion;

he was even eloquent on such matters.

The making of poetry he seemed to regard as a game,

albeit to be played in a magic circle. The latter had al-

ready been drawn; Auden's task, as he considered it, was

to redefine and be the custodian of its rules. All his con-

versation about Art was, so to speak, sub specie ludi.

I still remember some of the things he said on that first

visit—though not, alas, his exact words. He was forever

putting forth little Scholastic or psycho-analytic proposi-

tions: "Angels are pure intellect," 'Tristan and Isolde were

unloved only children," Pelleas had "alarming tricho-

maniac tendencies," "The sign of a man's loss of power

is when he ceases to care about punctuality" (Auden

himself lived by the clock—"I am hungry only if the clock

says it is time to eat") "and of the woman's, when she

stops caring about dress." These too were—so they seemed

—part of the game.

I was puzzled at first by what I took to be contradictions

in his personality. He would sail on steady rudders

of reason and logic, yet profess to curious, if not super-

stitious, beliefs—in graphology, for instance (I have a

graphological chart with an analysis of his writing, the

souvenir of an evening in Venice), in astrology, in the

telepathic powers of cats, in black magic ( as it is described

in Charles Williams's novels), in categories of tempera-

ment ( I was a "Dionysian" if I happened to work at night)

,

in preordination, in fate. Another, though more apparent

than real, contradiction in him was his display of good

citizenship. However lofty his criticism of Society, he was

almost too conscientious in fulfilling his everyday demo-


cratic duties. He would even serve on juries ( I remember

his having stalled one for two weeks, "Not for Justice, of

course—I quite understood the point involved—but be-

cause the housewife jurists were motivated purely by

revenge"). He was properly and justly outraged by us for

our failure to vote.

Auden's mind was didactic, but it was also, for meanyway, happily heuristic. Few people have taught me as

much, and after he left, books he had talked about, from

Groddeck to de Tocqueville, began to appear in our

library. Nor do I confine his influence on me to literature,

for however good his literary criticism ( and why haven't

his pieces on Santayana, on Yeats, and on so many others,

been collected?), he always seemed to me more profound

as a moralist—indeed, he is one of the few moralists whose

tone I can bear.

I recall only two events of his visit, apart from our work.

One day he complained of pressure in his ears. We took

him to a doctor, who removed large wax globes from each

ear. Auden was intrigued by this and kept referring to the

"extraordinary little creatures" that had been harboring

in his auditory canals. We also attended a two-piano per-

formance of Cost Fan Tutti together—an omen, perhaps, for

the Rake is deeply involved in Cost. The following letters

came from Auden after his return to New York.

THREE OPERAS 149

7 Cornelia Street

New York 14, N.Y.

20th November 1^47

Dear Mrs. Stravinsky,

First, an account of my stewardship, I have

(a) Posted the letter to the Guggenheim Foundation.

(b) Called Miss Bean.

(c) Called Mr. Heinsheimer.

The journey was a nightmare. The flight was cancelled; I was

transferred to an American Airlines local which left at 7:00 a.m.,

stopped everywhere and reached New York at 4 a.m. this morn-

ing. The meals, as usual, would have tried the patience of a stage

curate, so you can imagine what I felt, after a week of your lux-

urious cuisine. And finally, of course, I got back here to a pile of

silly letters to answer-<a job I loathe.

The only consolation is the pleasure of my writing you this

bread-and-butter letter (how do you say that in Russian?). I

loved every minute of my stay, thanks to you both, and shall

look forward with impatience to the next time we meet

Greetings to Vassily, Das krankheitliebendes Fraulein, Popka,

Mme. Sokolov, La Baroness des Chats, etc.2

Yours ever, Wystan Auden

P.S. Could you give the enclosed note to the maestro?

[Enclosed note]—Du Syllabiste—Au compositeur

Cher Igor Stravinsky

Memo. Act I, Sc. 1,

Je crois que ca sera mieux si cest un oncle inconnu du hero au

lieu de son pere qui meurt, parce que comme ga, la richesse est

tout a fait imprevue, et la note pastorale nest pas interrompue

2 Vassily was our cat; the "illness-loving Fraulein" is our housekeeper,

Evgenia Petrovna; Popka, our parrot—we had forty parrots and lovebirds

at that time—was the special favorite of Evgenia Petrovna, and a relation-

ship alarmingly like that in Flaubert's Felicite existed between them; Mme.Sokolov was the wife of the actor and a dear friend and neighbor; the

Baroness was Catherine d'Erlanger, another friend and neighbor.


par le douteur, settlement par la presence sinistre du villain. Ence cas, la girl possedera un pere, pas un oncle.

Etes-vous d'accord? Je tiendrai silence pour oui

Wystan Auden

P.S. I can't tell you what a pleasure it is to collaborate with you.

I was so frightened that you might be a prima donna.

Salut au * making"

7 Cornelia Street

New York 14, N.Y.

16th January 2948

Dear Igor Stravinsky,

Herewith Act I. As you will see, I have taken in a collaborator,

an old friend of mine in whose talents I have the greatest con-

fidence.3

We are in the middle of Act II now, which I will send as soon as

it is done.

I've marked places where cuts in the text can be easily made if

you want to, but of course, don't hesitate to make cuts of your

own.

With warmest remembrances to Mrs. Stravinsky and everyone

else. Yours ever, Wystan Auden

I was delighted with the first act, but afraid it might be

too long. Auden telegraphed:

24 January 1948

MANY THANKS FOR WIRE WILL MAIL ACT TWO MONDAY DO

NOT WORRY ABOUT EXCESSIVE LENGTH WHICH CAN BE CUT

AD LD3 WHEN WE MEET HOPE YOU COME IN MARCH BEFORE

I LEAVE APRIL SEVENTH WYSTAN AUDEN

8 Chester Kallman, who, in fact, wrote the latter part of the first scene

(after the aria "Since it is not by merit"), and the entire second scene; the

first scene of Act II (to the end of Tom's aria "Vary the song"), and the

entire second scene; the first scene of Act III ( except for the offstage lines

of Tom and Shadow), and the card-guessing game in scene two.

THREE OPERAS 151

7 Cornelia Street

New York 14, N.Y.

28th January 1Q48


Void Acte 11. It seemed best to transfer the Auction Scene to

Act III, as that is where the time interval occurs. Have made a

few slight alterations in our original plot in order to make each

step of the Rake's Progress unique, i.e.:

Bordel — Leplaisir.

Baba — Vacte gratuit.

La Machine — 11 desire devenir Dieu.

As I said in my wire, don't worry about length. Once you have

the whole material to look at, you can form your own opinions

and it won't be hard to make cuts and alterations.


I saw him next in the Hotel Raleigh ( in the "Lily Pons

Suite," to be exact), Washington, D.C., on 31st March,

1948. He had shown the finished libretto to T. S. Eliot

meanwhile (Eliot had noted one split infinitive and one

anachronism—"alluvial," I think; "numinous" would have

been the word used in the Hogarth period). We spent the

day working together, and I saw him again the following

week in New York, after a performance of the St. John

Passion in which Hindemith had played the viola d'amore

part.

7 Cornelia Street

New York 14, N.Y.

22nd November 1048


I got back from Washington yesterday afternoon to find your

letter. I enclose another verse which should, I think, come first.

It is difficult in this metre to get an exact rhythmical identity—

e.g., who cares what is slightly different from far too soon, but

they are, I hope, near enough. In case you can't read my pencil

on the score, here is the verse in printed CAPS:


SOON DAWN WILL GLITTER OUTSIDE THE SHUT-TER

AND SMALL BIRDS TWITTER: BUT WHAT OF THAT?SO LONG AS WERE ABLE AND WINE'S ON THETABLE

WHO CARES WHAT THE TROUBLING DAY IS AT?

I'm very excited about what I hear of the music from Robert

Craft. Very Mozartian, he says.


Via Santa Lucia 22

Forio d'Ischia

Prov. di Napoli

28th April 1Q4Q

The sirocco is blowing, which makes it a good day to write let-

ters. Arrived after a very boring voyage just before Easter,

when the Madonna ran down the street to meet her son, to the

sound of explosions. Your photo is up in the kitchen. Hope that

Act II is going well. I keep nagging at St. Restituta about it.

Love to all, Wystan

7 Cornelia Street

New York 14, N.Y.

24th October 194Q

Dear Igor,

Many thanks for your letter.

In order to distinguish Baba in character and emotion from the

two lovers, it seems to me that her rhythm should be more

irregular and her tempo of utterance faster. In writing her part

therefore I have given any line of Baba's twice the number

of accents as compared with the equivalent line of Anne's or

Tom's. If you find I have given her too many lines, cuts are easy

to make.

Much love to you and Vera, and come East soon.

Wystan

THREE OPERAS 153

7 Cornelia Street

New York 14, N.Y.

15th November 1949

Dear Igor,

If you haven't yet composed the Trio in Act II, Scene 2, here is

an alternative version of Baba's part where the rhymes fit the

others, which you may prefer to what I sent you.

Looking forward to hearing Persephone on Monday,4

Love to you both, Wystan

Baba

I'm waiting, dear. . . . Have done

With talk, my love. . . . I shall count up to ten. . . .

Who is she? One . . .

Hussy! . . . If I am found

Immured here, dead,

I swear . . . Two ... Til haunt you. . . .

Three. . . You know you're bound

By law, dear . . . Four . . . Before I wedCould I . . . Five, Six . . . have . . . Seven . . . then

Foreseen my sorrow? . . . Eight, Nine . . . Ten . . .

never, never, never . . .

1 shall be cross, Love, if you keep

Baba condemned to gasp and weepForever.5

7 Cornelia Street

New York 14, N.Y.

14th February 1951

Dear Igor,

Many thanks for your letter.

Delighted to hear that Act III, Scene 3, is nearly finished.

Mr. Kallman and I are a bit worried about the directing.6 As

4 A concert conducted by Robert Craft in Carnegie Hall.

5 I used the original text, not this revision.

6 It had been settled that the Rake was to be produced at La Fenice,

Venice, in September.


you can imagine, we—as librettists—are as concerned about the

stage goings-on as you are about the singing.

If it can possibly be arranged, Kallman and I would like to be

present in an advisory capacity when rehearsals start

Hope you have a lovely time in Cuba.

Love to all, Wystan

Via Santa Lucia 14

Forio (Tlschia

Prov. di Napoli

gth June 1932

Dear Igor,

Thank you for your letter. Everything still seems in a terrible

muddle here and I hope that we aren't going to have a scratch

performance with last-minute singers, designers, etc.

Mr. Kallman, who has been proof-reading the vocal score in

New York, writes me that in Act II, Scene 1 (p. 85), stage

directions prior to no. 48, the stage direction now indicates that

the broadsheet of Baba should be visible to the audience—the

face, that is. Did you mean this, because there seem to be two

serious objections:

( 1 ) It is physically impossible to show the broadsheet in such

a way that it is equally visible in all parts of the house.

Those of the audience who can't see it will be irritated.

(2) More importantly, the revelation that Baba has a beard

at this point will ruin the dramatic effect of the finale to

Act II, Scene 2.

I know you must be frightfully busy, so don t bother to answer

this, unless you violently disagree.

Looking forward to seeing you in Italy,

Love to all, Wystan

[Florence, October, 1958-

Kyoto, April, 1959.]

AppendIX

First Scenario for THE RAKE'S PROGRESS

—Stravinsky-Auden

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Stravi„aky , igor , lee2 _1971

Memories and ComiBe„taries

Documents

Stravinsky Memorias